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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.

If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.

IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.

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> As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.

EU is working on mandating scans of all your private encrypted messages right now. EU data protection is marketing for the gullible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719

A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning.

The way this is going is definitely worrying, but what you're saying is disingenous at best.

Furthermore, even if this passes somehow, that doesn't change the fact that the US remains an unreliable partner. Now we have two governments scouring through your data instead of one.

> A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning

What are you talking about? It is the EU Commission's wish together with EPP to scan everything including E2EE, photos, videos. The original proposal even had a section about analyzing voice calls.

The EU isn’t a single entity, it’s a whole ecosystem of actors pushing their own agenda. The parliament, which represents the people, has been very clearly opposed to chat control

No news to me. Reactionary authoritarians are a threat to freedom everywhere.

> Public Money, Public Code

This seems like a very good principle to adhere to in general. Anything that is funded by the public needs to serve the public interest, in my opinion.

Putting public money into e.g. proprietary software and proprietary services that are then operated and gated by a few selected companies, for profit, with their only goal being the rent seeking via long term government contracts, is in my opinion far from being in the public's best interest.

I'm not sure why the OP didn't provide the link to the petition: https://publiccode.eu

I do not trust either but you have to at least agree that having some sort of mutually recognised data privacy framework is a good idea because the courts can enforce it then. Saying everything must be from EU is also slightly silly and we should instead have something similar like certification (cyber act ?) to ensure enough competition exists to avoid service degradation. IMO cryptography could be the answer to many privacy related issues for the cross border transfers.

Also these decisions related where the data is stored and which service is used are under control of each commercial org buying them. The risks are assessed at the end of the day and in case of any issues the providers change. Why would a publicly funded org store citizen data in the US is a question regardless of privacy laws though.

Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?

It's well overdue to take seriously and put all our efforts behind the many (various but little known) local-first initiatives.

See for instance: https://elfaconsortium.eu/ It's a race against time.

> Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?

This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.

Irony is not bad faith.

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