Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek
politico.eu
politico.eu
> Italy's data protection authority is asking Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek for formal responses on how it handles Italians' data when they use its AI chatbot app.
> The authority known as the Garante on Tuesday said it sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China.
1) have a person you can contact in an organisation about your data
2) store people’s personal information as securely as if it’s credit card data
3) you have to be clear about what you’re doing with data from people in the EU and not store said data on servers outside the EU.
All seems reasonable to me!
In fact it's tech market is predominantly dominated by US tech companies (and probably soon Chinese ones as well)
That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities…
It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang.
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The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead.
What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
So it's "unfair" when others work harder than us?!
> right to express discontent against the government
Last time I checked, the USA had "freer" speech than the EU.
So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum?
Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
How about if we have two farmers with similar patches of land, one works it exactly to his needs, consuming everything he produces. The other one works as hard as he can, weekends included, with the surplus irrigating and buying tools and more land that make him extra productive, such as 10 years down the road he has amassed significant wealth while his neighbor is still living from harvest to harvest.
Still unfair?
Sally gets 90% and gets an A. You get 80% and get a B.
Next year Sally gets 100% and gets an A. You get 80% and it's a D because you didn't keep up with Sally.
Pretty unfair right? Well, that's how capitalism works. So you go and write a regulation that says 80% is a B.
Because Capitalism is not a school, it's real life. In real life the more, harder and smarter you work - the more you get (generally). And the more you have - the more you can leverage that to make even more. And in the process the society and everybody else gains even more since you only capture a small slice of the value you produce.
It's the beautiful process that got us out of abject poverty (literal mud) to the amazing luxury we are enjoying today.
What's unfair is to rule that "this is all I am willing to work and nobody else is allowed to work more". And countries dumb enough to self-own themselves like that will quickly be leapfrogged by smarter countries willing to work harder, longer and smarter.
Because the real world doesn't care about your ideology, it only cares about results. And communism has always failed miserably, everywhere it was tried.
https://x.com/thelouperez/status/1852126581872881711?s=46&t=...
And in any case, if your citizens fought for rights for themselves, and won those rights in their own country from their own government, why does that mean it is "unfair" that others in other countries leverage their lack of such rights or privileges for an advantage? Perhaps it is much MORE "unfair" that you are trying to impose your own framework and guarantees on others, who may not have the same per-capita wealth, or the same cultural values!
For example, the "third world" is complaining that you "first world people" cut down all your trees over centuries, used a lot of fossil fuels and built up your economies, and now you've put in place standards that you expect them to follow, so they can't build up their own economies. You want Brazil to preserve its rainforest, but you didn't preserve your own forests. This concept of "unfair" that you're espousing is quite dubious and hypocritical!
But you don't just try to warn, you try to impose rules on them which pull up the ladder behind you. It's like the big cartels of corporations that lobby the government for licenses and regulations, because they "recognized the mistakes" that can happen in an unregulated environment which allowed them to grow so quickly, and lo and behold, it becomes far more costly for anyone to disrupt them.
How convenient. Something might be a "good thing" but not an "unmitigated good". You can wax poetic cherrypicking only your good motives, but it turns out that your rhetoric also hides ulterior motives. Well, if we don't have anything to discuss, I guess you won't answer me on that point.
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Or somewhat similar: When the USA bombed Laos, we were doing them and Vietnam a favor of course, because we recognized the mistakes of Communism and didn't want them to become Communist. Because the "Domino Theory" stated that allowing communism to spread would make mankind more miserable. So we had to nip it in the bud, even if it meant killing a lot of people. Same in South America etc. In this case, we hadn't even "realized the mistakes", but we were so sure we didn't want others to have a different economic system, that we were willing to kill them to prevent it.
Btw, they resisted, we withdrew, and to this day Vietnam has a Communist government, and is relatively prosperous. But in Cuba and North Korea we still keep crippling sanctions on them, to "prove" that their system is harming their people. Even if Cuba presents zero threat to us, we will continue total sanctions on the entire country. And we will welcome Cuban refugees with open arms, while refugees from Colombia etc are turned back, because the former can spread the word about what a terrible system they have in Cuba.
We can export the costs of our war on drugs, our industrial waste, etc. to Mexico and other countries, and "fairness" somehow is not mentioned. Anglophone countries can occupy India for centuries, cause famines and repress opportunities, but then say it's "unfair" that Indians with H1B visas are taking our jobs for lower wages. European empires could establish protectorates and extract resources, and then lament about the "immigrants" from those territories polluting their culture. There is no "fairness" in geopolitics, is my point. At bottom it's all self-interest and hypocrisy, dressed up in crude attempts at some kind of moralizing language that any decently-informed person would have massive cognitive dissonance swallowing.
Many people who blame Putin for annexing Crimea would then applaud Trump for annexing Canada or Greenland. They'd look past USA's invasions and occupations halfway around the world as "mistakes were made", but hyperfocus on another country's invasions of a neighbor or putting pressure on their neighbor. All I can say is, don't have a double standard. Every superpower pressures their neighbors, but since the 50s, only one country goes halfway around the world to bomb, invade and occupy faraway countries that present zero threat to it. And the government of that country is also the one moralizing to everyone else to stop doing what they're doing. So yeah, I take the moral arguments with a massive grain of salt.
Europe has no competitors to the US/Chinese tech giants and their citizens want to use technology like anybody else without a layer of bureaucracy preventing them from doing basic stuff.
I don't think European citizens have been forced to use Uber, Airbnb, Apple, Android, Facebook , WhatsApp and so on.
There are no companies that rise meteorically, capture billions of users and then collapse if they can't monetize. There are just companies that quietly provide products and services users want. If that's considered a failure to you, then... okay? Signal is American, but Telegram is Russian. And you can just, you know, send a text message, without involving any third party (but both your phone companies can see it).
Oh and the b2b companies... like ASML and SWIFT.
In most cases those companies are knockoffs of American companies and you've yet to mention cases were Europe is actually leading the way (aside from some unique cases it doesn't happen regularly)
P.s. Russia is not part of Europe, you can safely leave it out (and yes they've plenty of competitors to american companies telegram, Yandex, VK etc. we can't say the same for Europe)
Europeans simply do not see why they should try to "innovate" the American way: creating products that no one actually needs, and trying to get people to buy them anyway, often by killing the alternatives, which often results in more work, lower wages and higher prices for everyone. Europeans (other than AfD voters) would rather have a good enough society that stays good enough and doesn't decay.
You seem to know well what Europeans want but I bet you never got scammed by a taxi driver. Europeans like everybody want to simply pay less by having an open market that allows the best players to offer services without artificially inflating the price because that specific category some privilege.
If you claiming that Europe is not decaying probably you're living in the wrong Europe.
Europe is decaying faster than you think.
The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments.
Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.
For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.
On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers.
Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation.
If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding.
Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.
There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this
5. frequent new legal interpretations that become the basis of enforcement and then you have to rearchitect the whole way you were handling data
always good to impose onerous rules on R&D when you are critically losing the R&D and capital race
5. Now that is just false, or you have some really bad architects, if you are so sensitive to new legal interpretation (which there haven't been any significant ones)
If you are arguing against any of these, for which there are lot of data I think you are not up for discussion.
Source?
2. i don’t see how you can look at, for instance, random EU jurisdictions not allowing Google Fonts on your website due to GDPR ( but only some jurisdictions and only years after the law was passed) and see that as inconsistent and moving target enforcement - and that is just one well known example of many many many
Where did you get that from lol
You should have had such a system even before GDPR came into existence, but after it did? Your organization's lack of organization is not the legislator's problem.
Even this website you are commenting on isn’t GDPR compliant lol, they won’t delete your text if you request.
Gdpr is about personal data, not anonymous (you can always put your real name, if you want) texts. Nor does hn do any tracking.
Try actually looking at the gdpr, easily findable [even using google search] - it's not what you seem to believe it is.
Handle PII as you would handle live ammo. Always know where you store it. Don't toss it randomly. Don't experiment with it; neutralize it first!
Use it to hit particular targets, and never shoot it at random directions.
But thing is, PII is not "live ammo". Artificially designating it so simply raises the cost of working with it. Doing that designation through an amazingly dumb law just makes EU Internet startups unfeasible. Meanwhile, US and Chinese startups flourish since they don't have this limitation.
Self-own, really.
A real, practical example is that US web startups do not have to annoy their US users with cookie banners for simply using Google Analytics on their website - like the EU ones must. Underneath, the implementation and PII data protections are exactly the same, but the UX is night and day.
Fun fact, before the law, in many places in Europe it was encouraged to separate them before putting them in the trash bin.
The US has and will come to your defense, but we can’t defend you all from self-inflicted wealth-destroying policies.
While threatening tariffs and a hostile takeover of Greenland?
2. Trump has bad policies yes, although I hadn’t heard anything about an actual military takeover of Greenland.
3. It’s not as if EU doesn’t have tariffs on the Us already, for instance you all are very protective of the auto industry as well as your domestic farmers, just to name a few. I think tariffs are bad policy on both sides of the atlantic
Don't forget to register for LA's olympic games you might win the mental gymnastic gold
we are literally not even on the same continent. france and many others can’t be bothered to spend hardly anything, yet somehow we are terrible allies
> france and many others can’t be bothered to spend hardly anything
Hardly anything besides propping up 70% of the EU
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/18794.jpeg
Also even if you sent 100% of the money collected through tariffs back to the EU through Ukraine, what's the point we're back to square one with extra steps in the middle... The US are serving their own interests, it's totally fine, you don't have to pretend they're sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity.
*Fabulously wealthy people do exist here, you know.
Meanwhile in the US
- mortgage are above 7%, twice as high as in Europe
- min wage is bellow the Polish min wage, half the German min wage
- life expectancy is going down, 4 years under the EU 27 average, 6 years less than France
- wealth and income inequalities are worse than pretty much any EU country: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-...
- parental leaves, paid vacations, unions, &c. are either optional or frowned upon
- pensioner poverty is 2x+ more than in the EU: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/12/02/which-...
2. Yes true, the minimum wage in Poland is 13 cents higher than the US. Fewer than 1% of US income earners are paid the federal minimum wage. In Poland, ~15% of income earners are paid the minimum wage.
3. Yes our life expectancy is bad - although better when you do demographic control, we have a problem with obesity and easy access to guns causing suicide.
4-6. sorry but relative wealth measures are not effective for deciding how affluent a society is. our ‘pensioners’ in poverty are only in poverty relative to the very high median earnings in the US. They could take their money to the EU and spend better than many of those other retirees.
We need a better metric that captures welfare and general life satisfaction. That's the only metric that matters in my world view.
EU should maybe focus on like not having titled nobility and monarchy anymore and actual estate taxation
> In 2023, 92% of the surveyed individuals used internet and 70% bought or ordered products or services online in the 12 months preceding the survey.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
In Europe we have titles for show, in the US you don't have the titles but you still have the lords
The US doesn’t really have that at all, although our estate tax could certainly be much higher but it is still higher than in practice in Europe.
> The US doesn’t really have that at all
Of course, my local pub is older than your country, generational wealth isn't a thing in the US, as is generational anything
What you have is multi billionaires buying their way into politics and getting in the government while no one ever voted for them
The titles in EU are inherited or bought with inherited money.
There are multiple studies on this, but they all seem to converge on the number of around 80% of current millionaires in the US being first generation/self-made[0]. That is, the ones who didn’t receive an inheritance from their parents or other family members.
It also shows some other interesting stats, such as “only 8% of those in the study attended prestigious private schools, with 62% attending state schools.”
0. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
My idea of US is based on living and working there (a while ago though) and (for the last 20+ years) watching powerlessly how more and more of the products and services I interact with and use every day are designed there (and often build in China) while the EU is becoming less and less relevant.