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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

Great, now you will see how that looks.

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