The paradox between supporting consumer rights with actions like universal usb-c adoption, but also complete elimination of any privacy rights at all. Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.
PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.
Modern day EU, over the past 5 years or so is just as bad anti-privacy as USA, for no clear benefit too. Just surveillance for surveillance sake.
This is not true. Whether you believe that FISA courts have teeth, or whether 3 letter agencies abide by the law, in most of Europe you do not even have the pretense of this. UK/FR and to a lesser extent DE are all much worse.
The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015, and the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption for domestic surveillance.
The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US.
Let's not forget that Chat Control is pushed by US non-profit Thorn, and implemented by software that this non-profit develops! Furthermore, if you look at how this software actually works (even in "self-hosted" setup it sends hash values to Thorn's servers [1]), it's pretty clear that this tech could easily be abused to perform surveillance on the EU from within the US.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260721220432/https://get.safer...
Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries.
> The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015
So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore, is that what you believe?
> the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". [...] Europe continues to push policies [...] for domestic surveillance.
So if it's surveilling allies, it's all good in your opinion?
> The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US.
"Far far"? Do you even realise that Europe is not one single country? The US elected Trump, twice.
This is a bad retort. The U.S. has 2 relevant parties. Most countries in the EU have at least twice as many relevant parties and there are over 25 countries in Europe, so you’re looking at close to 100 relevant parties.
> Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries.
And yet neither party in the US is pushing for it...
> So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore, is that what you believe?
Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Or if you believe this without evidence, do you have any evidence this is not occurring in Europe?
> So if it's surveilling allies, it's all good in your opinion?
Lol, lmao even. Yes, of course it is. Allies spy on each other. The Europeans do it to each other massively and have done since the dawn of Europe. Good lord, go read some history.
> "Far far"? Do you even realise that Europe is not one single country? The US elected Trump, twice.
Again, I live in Europe. I am well aware, but thanks for the classic European condescension. I don't like Trump. But how has he weakened privacy rights? And yes, beacause I don't want to write dozens of caveats for each teeny tiny member state, I consider Europe to be dominated by happenings in DE + FR + UK. I don't care what Latvia does.
This is such a strange statement about a massively culturally diverse part of the world.
Many European countries speak such poor English that it'd be a miracle if they developed some sort of unified condescension.
I'd argue a big part of Europe not performing as well as other parts of the world economically is the LACK of any defined culture, it's really more like a hodgepodge of countries that have a thin layer of cooperation
It's not a strange statement in the slightest if you live here or spend any appreciable time here. I take it you do not.
If you randomly take two Europeans, they probably speak a different language and have completely different opinions, but chances are that they can't even understand each other. If you randomly take two US citizen, they most certainly have a shared identity.
If you take two random Europeans, they most likely don't have the same school system. The bank of the first probably does not exist in the country of the second. One may be in the EU, the other may not. They have a different army, they possibly have a long history of being at war against each other in the past. They don't have the same architecture. They have a vastly different public transport system.
Sure, there is an identity at every level. Europeans do recognise themselves as Europeans, like South Americans do recognise themselves as South Americans. But the shared identity between a Chilean and a Brazilian is much smaller than the shared identity between two Brazilians.
When the USA hockey team played against Canada after Trump threatened to annex Canada, the Canadians booed the US team. Not because they hated the players, but because they wanted to show that they were pissed. As a response, the US supporters booed the Canadian players. Why? Because they felt attacked "as Americans", not because they supported Trump's idea of militarily invading Canada.
That is a shared identity. And surely in this crowd, not everybody identified as a white heterosexual male.
I believe that there is a bit of an asymmetry between US people and... well the rest of the world, in that the WHOLE world has some level of insights into the US. Whether they want it or not, for many different reasons.
However, the US don't typically have a good insights into... the rest of the world. Which does make sense: the rest of the world is pretty big.
Of course the US is more complicated than "they elected Trump". Sure, there are 50 states. But everybody knows that (be it just because your president repeatedly threatens to annex Canada as the 51st state ;-) ). People in the rest of the world do not need to "live in the US" to have that level of insights, because the US makes sure they do, by force if necessary.
The mere fact that you don't seem to be aware of this asymmetry at all suggests that you over-estimate your "pretty good insight into all of Europe".
I do agree with your general point, though: I would expect your average European to have a better understanding of the politics of the US than your average American would have of even a prominent European country like Germany.
But a random European can easily say that the parent is sooo stereotypical of the USA :-).
Note that I believe there is some level of European identity. But "European condescension" is not really part of it, I would say. What the OP may have felt was maybe some "non-US condescension"? I think it could be a thing. The OP said "believe me I know Europe better than you, because I live in Europe AND I am an American" (which somehow implies that being an American made them more knowledgeable? Not sure). The answer was something like "dude, it's so American to believe and proudly say that you must know better because you are American", I felt. Sure, it's condescending. But I don't think that whatever the European shared identity is contains a "they are condescending against anyone non-European".
Yes, of course. That is why GP said "anymore".
Thanks for playing!
> I don't like Trump. But how has he weakened privacy rights?
Attacks on rule of law and civil liberties have increased, and the right to privacy is one of those liberties. It's of course not limited to Trump, he wasn't in office when Snowden showed the world the scale of American mass surveillance on domestic and foreign citizens.
> Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
I'm totally unsure what you are attempting to imply. That mass surveillance by the American state stopped at some point in the last 10 years?
> Allies spy on each other. The Europeans do it to each other massively and have done since the dawn of Europe. Good lord, go read some history.
What does that even mean "read history" ahaha. Espionage != mass surveillance. You do understand the difference, do you not?
> thanks for the classic European condescension
> I consider Europe to be dominated by happenings in DE + FR + UK. I don't care what Latvia does.
l m a o. Oh say can you see...
Of course. As I noted before, dripping in European condescension. Nothing you can actually point to, just condescension from a region that has been left behind over the past century.
> Attacks on rule of law and civil liberties have increased, and the right to privacy is one of those liberties. It's of course not limited to Trump, he wasn't in office when Snowden showed the world the scale of American mass surveillance on domestic and foreign citizens.
Which right or in what way has the right to privacy been attacked? Fully agree with you on attacks on rule of law. And I find Trump incredibly dangerous. But I do not think privacy in the US today has suffered. Please educate me.
> I'm totally unsure what you are attempting to imply. That mass surveillance by the American state stopped at some point in the last 10 years?
I am not implying anything. The Freedom Act curtailed a bunch of activities. You are implying nothing has changed. All of the Snowden revelations implicated many European countries: intelligence agencies spying on each others populations. I am asking you if you believe nothing has changed in the US do you 1) have any evidence of this and/or 2) believe that anything has changed in Europe? You've answered neither.
> What does that even mean "read history" ahaha. Espionage != mass surveillance. You do understand the difference, do you not?
Do you understand that the mass surveillance of European people was done at the behest of the intelligence agencies of those countries? And ditto for the NSA. The agreement was "you spy on mine and I'll spy on yours and we'll swap the intel". I am not talking about espionage. Foreign intelligence agencies spying on foreigners...what did you think they did?
> l m a o. Oh say can you see...
God, it's so painful. Yes in the same way that you talk about the US as a monolith and not 50 individual states. You don't care what Rhode Island does any more than I care what Latvia does.
Christ you guys are insufferable. It's no wonder everyone is leaving in droves.
Let's see about that; Just me, some small guy with no knowledge on the topic.
> Which right or in what way has the right to privacy been attacked?
The US scans your device if you enter their land, e.g. Oh; I heard ICE uses cameras to spy on their own citizen? What about the raising Flock Cameras?
> But I do not think privacy in the US today has suffered. Please educate me.
A giant corporation just attacked another one. There were no repercussions. If you think that isn't privacy: How about leaking civilian data to outsiders of the government? DOGE, anybody?
> I am not implying anything. The Freedom Act curtailed a bunch of activities. You are implying nothing has changed. All of the Snowden revelations implicated many European countries: intelligence agencies spying on each others populations. I am asking you if you believe nothing has changed in the US do you 1) have any evidence of this and/or 2) believe that anything has changed in Europe? You've answered neither.
Why does he has to provide evidence but you don't? Also, I have never heard that an European Country spied on civilians from another country. That's an US and Chinese business model. Things changed in the US. It is now a lawless country. A war mongering state which dumps its allies for their own benefit. They are actively hostile. Your second question is so unspecific I have to require elaboration: "believe that anything has changed in Europe?" - I assume you are referring to Privacy Laws? We had plenty of new laws _protecting_ consumers in this regards. Handling data responsible. Wait; What are you guys doing over there? Ah, right: You are pushing Age Verification and demand information on our criminal record systems. You are pushing biometric tracking. You are telling buys of your weapons that you have the right to disable them. Honestly: The US sucks right now. You guys have elected the stupidest idiot, twice. And now without any regulation you are actively supporting a technology which will undermine _all_ citizen in the world.
> Do you understand that the mass surveillance of European people was done at the behest of the intelligence agencies of those countries? And ditto for the NSA. The agreement was "you spy on mine and I'll spy on yours and we'll swap the intel". I am not talking about espionage. Foreign intelligence agencies spying on foreigners...what did you think they did?
Again: You are accusing all twenty five member states in one statement. To me you are just yelling polemic nonsense. EUROPOL is _cooperating_ with the US. They are hunting people breaking our laws. If any individual is lawless within our boundaries of justice, European states have the rights to try to prosecute them.
> God, it's so painful. Yes in the same way that you talk about the US as a monolith and not 50 individual states. You don't care what Rhode Island does any more than I care what Latvia does.
You are implying your behaviour. The US has _one_ president in order to bundle the power. Your states have their national rights. If you compare the US to the EU you are not informed.
> Christ you guys are insufferable. It's no wonder everyone is leaving in droves.
By appearing with such statements on the Internet as an European Civilian you are undermining our values. Maybe if you can not align with them you should proceed your journey.
That is false. They are not proposals, they are being actively discussed in trilogues which is way way past proposal stage.
Chat control V2 trilogue negotiation was last week and it included mass scanning of messages and private data. Thankfully the EU parliament rejected the idea but every 6 months like clockwork it comes back. The next trilogue is in November.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-trilogue-u...
If this was passed, it would force every single cloud provider and e2e chat provider to keep, filter and pass on your private information to Europol and other security agencies.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...
Quote:
1. Where reference is made in the Treaties to the ordinary legislative procedure for the adoption of an act, the following procedure shall apply.
2. The Commission shall submit a proposal to the European Parliament and the Council.
First reading
3. The European Parliament shall adopt its position at first reading and communicate it to the Council.
[many more items]
Item 3 hasn’t happened yet.
Europe values freedom too, but not as much as making sure people are not assholes. So, freedom of being an asshole is not a thing in Europe, and the government does the punching in the face so that you don't have to.
Which is best is honestly debatable. It is the usual question about the individual vs the collective. The US is on the individualist side, East Asia is on the collective side, Europe is somewhere in the middle.
This is not at all a freedom in the US. “The right to swing your fist ends at someone else’s nose.” You don’t get to harm someone else just for being “an asshole”. You can be an asshole back but you don’t get to violate their rights.
In the US, defamation laws are particularly narrow, insulting people is generally legal, and "hate speech" is mostly legal too. And even though it is not physical harm, it is definitely harmful. But Americans accept the compromise because they value free speech a lot.
In most of Europe, it is different. Defamation laws are broader, sometimes including telling the truth if it is done in a misleading way. Insulting people, public servants in particular may also be illegal, even though it is rarely applied on a day to day basis, it can be in some contexts. And what constitutes punishable hate speech is much broader, Germany is notorious for this when it comes to Nazism.
As for actual bloody harm. In the US not only you are allowed to defend yourself in case of an agression, you are supposed to, and you are given the tools to do so (i.e. guns). In several state, you can shoot people trespassing, something that is seen as barbaric in most of Europe. Europe also has self defense laws, but they tend to be narrower, and you are generally not allowed to carry weapons.
> As for actual bloody harm. In the US not only you are allowed to defend yourself in case of an agression, you are supposed to, and you are given the tools to do so (i.e. guns). In several state, you can shoot people trespassing
None of this is true for the US. You do not have a duty to defend yourself, in fact it is the opposite. You have a duty to retreat, and only if there is no reasonable avenue of escape without putting yourself more at risk do you have the right to strike back in self defense. The Castle doctrine you are referring to re: trespassing is a merely an exception to the rule, in which you do not have a duty to retreat within your own home. You still must meet the other requirements for self defense and can only respond with a level of force proportionate to the perceived threat.
Please, like what? GDPR?
And you have no protections from the "much more" bits, unlike in the US.
It's incredible that Europeans today think the culture of privacy is different. American privacy protections (from the government) were born out of European flaws.
The difference is that Europeans love the nanny state regulating private enterprise (GDPR) but never pointing that same effort against itself.
Insane compared to what? I don't know where you get your (wrong) information from, but there are no backdoors, of course there are e2ee chats. There are some parties who try to push for changing both. That's fine in a democracy, people can try to change things (and fail).
I will say that the EU has to do something about the practice of just retrying the same failed policy over and over again, hoping that at some point people won't pay attention anymore, that is in fact a huge issue.
The same is not true of Europeans and they generally believe their rights are much stronger than they are. Most Brits are not aware of the true nature of the Investigatory Powers Act. Most Frenchmen are not aware of Article L851-3.
Can you name a single law or privacy practice that Americans have that Europeans don’t?
As for Brits, they left EU and they are definitely going the 1984 way, I think this is generally agreed.
As for the US, 1A doesn't guarantee any form of privacy. 5A does, but in the very narrow sense of not requiring you to incriminate yourself. 4A is indeed about privacy, but it feels like those protections are constantly under fire, and SCOTUS regularly rules against private citizens who believe the government has run roughshod over their 4A protections.
Beyond that, judges seem to rubber-stamp surveillance warrants all the time, and it's currently very legal for law enforcement agencies to purchase private data on citizens from private businesses that have managed to collect it through whatever means. What's the point of the need to get a warrant before tracking someone's movements if the police can just pay Google or T-Mobile for location data? And don't get me started on Flock... they're a government surveillance agency without the "government" part.
Then there's the border search exemption, which is just nuts. Fortunately it seems some federal judges are sane and think the government shouldn't be allowed to trawl through our phones at the airport, but those rulings are not universal across the US at this point. And if and when that sort of case ends up in SCOTUS's lap, I don't trust them to do the right thing.
Frankly I think the US's privacy posture (when it comes to people keeping things private from the government) is pretty bad. Maybe it's still better then Europe, but that's still nothing to celebrate.
One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49852065
And
Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057
I dont buy this "europe not free" nonsense.
The Court's case law is recognized as is by EU, and includes some landmark privacy rulings, e.g., against access to contents and metadata of electronic comms without a court order (or comparable legal safeguards), or any forms of bulk surveillance.
Are you willing to live in the EU knowing that for the next 8 years the EU agencies will have access to every single message, email and picture you send your loved ones just in case one of those could be CSAM?
Even if that was overturned, how will one know if he data they intercepted and illegally obtained will be destroyed or if the text messages you sent to your wife/husband are not going to end up sold to the highest bidder on the darkweb?
> given the constitutions of various EU countries
EU law superseded any state law by default and that's by design. Even if the EU law is immoral and dangerous like the Chat Control law.
So a country's constitution will not save you if tomorrow all chat apps are doing client side scanning.
Scenarios like these make me consider, whether one day I need to vote for my country to also leave the EU, as it might become a surveillance nightmare. The moment chat control impacts me and my chats on my devices, I think I will have had enough of this. But the economic consequences are scary of course. So damned if you leave and damned if you don't. Sucks.
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
These are not people obstructing or harboring fugitives. They're people who ICE believed "looked foreign" (aka weren't white) and ignored them when they said they were US citizens. They spent days locked up simply because their skin is too brown and they speak with an accent.
It's absolutely disgusting. Educate yourself about what's actually happening out there.
Someone is spending way too much time blindly swallowing extreme right propaganda!
I know what you're going to say: not a citizen. But first they came for the foreigners, then...
The main reason that governments forcing USB-C is widely seen as good is because it limits the freedom of big corporations, which don't elicit much sympathy, but the principle is the same.
?
Literally brain dead to not support this
Couldn’t have picked a worse example
wtf are you on about?
Has the UK become a surveillance state?
It's almost never only about consumers. Via tech regulations, they protect European incumbents first in effect. They see US is ahead and make laws to destroy their moats. If Apple was in EU, you wouldn't have saw universal usb-c, because it would have hurt an EU company. But the more you look at how tedious is for a non-EU company to sell to EU customers, the exemptions they don't get, the specialists fees they got to put on the table, you'll see EU is more coherently described as protectionist than pro-consumer.
But in general, people usually complain the exact opposite of what you’re saying - that the regulations we have handicap our companies.
[0] TOOL #22. THE "SME TEST": https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5d2011d7-5470...
[1] No Country for Young Firms? https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/no-country-for-young-fi...
[2] OECD, about Germany 2025, e.g.: 'Industrial and labour market policies have tended to favour incumbents and hampered the reallocation of resources to young and innovative firms, weighing on allocative efficiency and slowing down structural change' (https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...)
At least in Poland the requirements before GDPR was the same for small startups and for large enterprises. If you wanted to set up a newsletter for a bunch of friends you had to do, technically, the same requirements and reports as the large telcos.
The only way to manage it was to effectively ignore it. I’ve met people who were afraid of setting up a landing page because you technically had to fill in paperwork and whatnot.
Ditto managing VAT across the borders and a bunch of other stuff.
It is better now in some ways - I think some newer regulations had it written down that they apply above a certain turnover threshold. We also we have saas-es to deal with a lot of beauricratic bs, and now also agents.
But I imagine for more human/real-world stuff the issues can’t be overcome with tech. E.g. if you hire a 4th team member and that person immediately goes into months-long health/birth timeout, it can derail a whole project. We barely avoided that once - didn’t hire a person due to culture fit, but we later suspected they planned to take a leave shortly after getting hired. It’s a common thing in bigger corps but they can afford it.
As a side note, in Poland used to have a lot of such BS, but our general culture is about hacking around it.
For example it’s common for smaller companies to have employees „self employed” to avoid most of regulatory burden of hiring, whereas the bigger companies need to have employees actually employed with all the legal consequences. Technically anyone can get audited but below 20-50 people the government won’t bother, so it balances itself out.
Germany is another animal altogether - the last time I was doing business there you couldn’t even theoretically open a new company at all because they had a catch 22. To open a company you had to have a bank account to pay the notary, and to open an account you had to have a company. And either the notary or the bank had to blink.
People with money >> Politicians >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Average citizens.
But hey, you got Hollywood propaganda and unwavering patriotism to make up for it.