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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> “Ideally, in our view,” they say, “it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption.”

- Spain

It is hard to even comment on in idea that extreme. The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.

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Spain has been traditionally and particularly idiotic about tech legislation. Some examples:

- There was (and is) a fee on every CD-R, DVD-R, BR-R, hard drive, SSD, printer... as a "just in case it happens to store/copy copyright-protected material at some point ever" fee [0].

- They forced link aggregators to pay newspapers/sites for linking to their content, even just using their <og> tags. [1].

So such insane statement comes as an absolute non-surprise to anyone who's followed Spanish tech legislation for a while.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociedad_General_de_Autores_y_...

[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/google-news-spain-faceb...

> - There was (and is) a fee on every CD-R, DVD-R, BR-R, hard drive and SSD as a "just in case it happens to store copyright-protected material at some point ever" fee [0].

Sadly, Spain isn't the only country that does this. The copyright lobby has been very successful at making people fund their failing business model.

Yep. Unfortunately this is pretty normal. I would be fine with it, if it meant I get immunity from persecution when distributing pirated content. Unfortunately that would go against corporate rent seeking.

Spain, inheriting Franco's legacy, likes their own secret internal police and abuse of power. For exampel, Madrid was using Pegasus spyware to spy Catalonian politicians and separatists

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/catalonia-ban...

From this background, it's more understandable they want to all possible methods to spy their own citizens.

Yet the socialists were runnng the show when all of this has happened. Of course, when Pegasus is found on Pedro Sánchez's phone, they "ban" it.

What would you say about a yearly fee per every employee, if company owns a multifunctional printer? Also in EU.

The EU don't have a monopoly on dumb laws.

> The rest of us are lucky the EU has failed so comprehensively at establishing a global tech presence.

Lots of us think that the world would be better if tech companies didn't play so fast and loose with our data, and were better regulated.

No end-to-end encryption means they have more data though.

No, it just means whatever data they have is less secure. Encryption does nothing about data collection.

This is a silly distinction, if they have just as much data but it's encrypted and they can't use it, most people would call that less data.

I am as much anti sureveillance as you get. There is abdifference so between end-to-end encryption of communications (all for it) and collecting user data (all against it). Usually I hate semantics, because most of the time people use it to nitpick on deffinitiom ignoring what people understand using a word, but here the differwnce between the two things is a) technical reality and b) relevant for topic at hand.

Well encrypted data is practically useless to the collector. They could just as well be a random noise. Metadata may be worth something, but not nearly as much.

The solution there is political, not technical.

The political solution is way too fragile.

Hmmm. I wonder if the GDPR could be leveraged against the EU in this case?

Yeah, in a world where DMCA exists (guilty until proven innocent... with no process to prove that for normal people), whining about EU is really out of the line.

Great, now you will see how that looks.

I wish euros could explain to me why they speak of "their data" as if that was their souls

The amount of data you generate and store about yourself is akin to everything you generate and store physically. Between the bills I pay, the notes I write down and the photos I take, I find it pretty reasonable to affirm "my data" are representative of what I am.

I have one answer for that if the asker is based in the US:

I see Americans going on and on about denying warrantless searches of their house and car. It's everywhere. Assert your rights, don't consent to a search, remain silent, don't talk to the police. That position is logically inconsistent with then letting every random company you ever have any vague dealings with (like loading their web page) deeply investigate your life in excruciating detail. If you're arguing against the first of these, you should be arguing against the latter too.

I agree 80%, but it isn't logically inconsistent. Google can't arrest you, the odds of Google employees shooting anyone in their day-to-day work is extremely low, and Google (all capitalist enterprises, really) managers are heavily incentivised to ignore any beliefs I hold that aren't strictly impacting their ability to do business.

Any data that Google has is available to law enforcement, and that is a major problem, but in the abstract someone can object to government invasion of privacy without objecting to Google's dragnet.

EU is a wide range of countries with very wide range of expectations on anything so all generalizations are wrong.

EU’s function is to create a mechanism to find a common ground but that’s very hard so that’s why EU is has made a name for being slow and ineffective.

Spain and Switzerland or Sweden and Italy would have very, very different understanding on what the state should be able to do and how much involvement they must have because the way they govern their countries and the problems they face are very different.

Spain or Italy would usually be arguing on preserving some traditional way of doing things, Finland and Denmark would attack the issue very pragmatically and have great ideas that can’t possibly work anywhere else and the France and Germany would propose something that would increase their power in the area and the original concerns would be secondary.

fiy, switzerland is not in eu

Sure, I'm giving it as an example of the extremes of the European mindset. IMHO, it would have been better to have Switzerland not only as a country that follows that EU laws as being in the single market but also contribute into regulating it.

It isn't, however due to the bilateral agreements they might agree on specific changes, depending on how they see them.

Even if it goes to vote, sometimes referendum results might turn out differently than expected.

Not surprising from Spain if you ask me.

Spain's central gov's been found to actively spy trhough malware politically opposing parties[1], so hearing they are against e2e encryption just sounds about right.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CatalanGate

Well, it shouldn't be too surprising that a literal dictatorship would act this way. It may not be a dictatorship at the moment, but it was not too many years ago, and the only reason it's not a dictatorship today is only because the dictator died of old age. Spain does not have a very good track record with democracy, so of course such a culture isn't going to value freedom and liberal (in the classical sense) democratic values.

After Snowden I wouldn’t consider ourselves lucky

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