Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Is this only for American citizens?

Correct. FISA Section 702 still requires Apple conduct warrantless surveillance on the vast majority of their customers (including all not in the US).

Apple’s transparency report says they turn over data on around 70,000 users per year to the US government without a warrant.

FISA Section 702 is set to expire at the end of this year, but the proposed renewal actually expands the scope and makes it way, way worse:

https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1734305434721210564

Do you know how this relates to non-US customers in... non-US? I.e. everyone else, everywhere else? And, whatever applies to Apple in this sense, I assume also applies to Google.

If the US government knows when my laundry is done, because my local HomeAssistant instance uses google play services to send a push notification...

Apple is US based company. So even if they break the local law, US has upper hand on enforcing Apple to provide information if they don't care about diplomatics.

it's only for some American citizens.

i.e. currently in America. not in some secret list. etc. the usual.

As a foreigner, protection from the American government is the exception, not the rule.

This lack of suitable protection is what nuked the GDPR agreement between the USA and the EU (twice). The current iteration of this framework, which I can only think of as part of a war of attrition against Max Schrems, is largely the same and will likely be invalidated in the future for the same reasons.

This isn't only an American issue, of course; every country or economic bloc wants to keep its citizens' data within their borders but also wants the ability to exploit intelligence for foreign parties.

If you want the legal protections you enjoy at home, avoid foreign products and services. If you have to pick a foreign service, pick one from a region that's least likely to cause trouble for you.

> which I can only think of as part of a war of attrition against Max Schrems

I think they're desperate to find something that works. But the problem is, US law is not compatible and the EU is refusing to admit that.

Indeed. The USA has the freedom not to be compatible with EU law and decided to prefer the ability to deny European citizens appropriate data protection over letting American companies hold EU citizens' data.

I'm not sure what drives the EU to form such meaningless pacts every couple of years. I'm guessing a combination of lobbyists and sucking up to the American government are the driving force behind these deals. It's rather sad, really.

I think it's because how many of the major tech products come from the US. If they started to actively enforce the violations every time it becomes official it's a violation nearly every company in Europe would be affected. Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Apps, Office 365, etc. all leading to violations would be a major thing, it would give some European tech companies a massive boost and probably improve European tech scene but it would be a major issue for a while.

There's plenty of European tech, but European tech companies either suck at marketing, suffer from outdated business practices, or get bought out by American companies when they start growing.

Any data center can start competing with at least the important parts of Amazon/Google/Microsoft if they collect the right open source tools and invest in making them easily accessible, but very few seem to want to take any risks. They'd rather have customers stick to their own custom APIs and web dashboards than implement any kind of common standard.

I want the European tech industry to be better, but if that's done through fining American companies into impracticality we'll only end up stuck with the annoying practices that have caused American companies to be so popular in the first place.

> There's plenty of European tech, but European tech companies either suck at marketing, suffer from outdated business practices, or get bought out by American companies when they start growing.

I would say the issue is mostly on the funding side of things. US companies get more funding so can splash the cash when marketing and can hire larger teams to build faster.

>every country wants its citizens data within its borders

Countries are actively trying to stop citizen data being at home. The TPP was one such example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com