Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokamak-teapot | Hacker News Reader

Being optimistic, which is perhaps not warranted here, but bear with me: The EU is perhaps one of the few places in the world where there will be controls mandated on the data. I'm not at all convinced they'll be anywhere near abuse-proof, but at least I would expect to see an attempt.

View on HN

>The EU is perhaps one of the few places in the world where there will be controls mandated on the data.

For non-state actors. Government(s) will obviously get exemptions in ways we won't find out until later. Look at GDPR and the EU commission.

I don't know about other EU countries, but in France the CNIL is pretty damn serious at telling the government to back off and respect the GDPR.

> ... they'll be anywhere near abuse-proof, but at least I would expect to see an attempt.

All police-like institutions will likely have full access right from the beginning, because of child pornography, terror or other "serious crimes".

That will be softened and weakened by the time until someone finds out this system was misused for stalking some VIP or because police wanted to catch a guy who had 10 grams of weed.

It's all happened before, it will happen again.

The extremely high taxes of Europe are themselves a form of abuse.

These digital wallets and digital currency systems will just be used to enforce taxation.

Meanwhile, where do all those taxes go? To the welfare state (ie. pensions and healthcare for baby boomers), and to maintain the bureaucracy.

Hopefully the digital wallet will be leveraged to reduce the bureaucracy. We can’t continue like this without hurting ourselves.

Taxes are not abuse, especially not pensions or healthcare. You do realize that in all likelihood your parents benefit from both, and so will you, unless ofc you are a lot more wealthy than most citizens.

Nobody said that taxes are abuse.

EU governments are exempt from the requirements of GDPR. In some countries police can access large amounts of data without the need for a warrant. For example German police do not need a warrant to get passwords to email account, PIN numbers for mobile phones, mobile usernames, birthdates, telco information, or hospital data.

They do need a warrant for all the mentioned things in Germany (except birthdates if accessed in public registers).

The GDPR does apply to governments in general (see Article 2) but criminal law enforcement authorities are exempt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com