Hacker News Reader

Comment by veeti | Hacker News Reader

Did people already forget all about the 2013 leaks? Do you actually think that the EU is not complicit in the same surveillance practiced by the US?

> For example, Der Spiegel revealed how the German Foreign Intelligence Service transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA", while Swedish Television revealed the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) provided the NSA with data from its cable collection, under a secret treaty signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance...

How is my data any more secure on a German server than an American server? Some asshole is snooping on it anyway, and the NSA gets access by extension.

View on HN

People forget that the reason this happens is that most countries have laws against spying domestically. They usually don't have laws prohibiting them from taking data from other spy agencies spying on their own country. So the cheap and easy workaround is you let your friends spy on you for you. It's usually pretty critical for counterintelligence anyway. As the first place an enemy tries to get into is the counterintelligence department.

This is the important part that is glanced over. It's very much a situation of tit for tat but we can be hopeful that rulings like these aren't just lip service. Schrems has been a positive force for privacy in the EU.

From corporate spying yes. However GDPR contains specific carve outs for national security, Police, etc.

Perhaps it isn't, but if that's the case the ruling is about giving you legal redress to fix it.

I was looking for a comment like this.

Yes, GDPR provides greater protection for privacy than US laws and hats off to the EU courts for trying to maintain that protection.

That said, the US and EU are so closely intertwined when it comes to intelligence that I doubt this provides much protection from Western state level actors.

The main problem GDPR solves is companies, not state actors (which are likely to ignore laws anyway).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com