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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

You have a very distorted perception of the state of privacy rights in Europe.

As an American living in Europe, it's generally Europeans who have a distorted perception. Most Americans know the bill of rights and the 1st/4th/5th amendments. Many Americans will know of the Patriot Act/NSA/Snowden revelations.

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.

Privacy from government is one thing, from corporations is another.

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.

I don't think we're talking about perception though. Europeans can certainly perceive their privacy rights to be greater than they actually are, but that doesn't mean those rights are inferior to that of Americans. Outside of things like the GDPR (which is more about data held by corporations and not the government), I don't know all that much about privacy laws in various European countries (and I expect they vary quite a lot country to country), so I don't know either way.

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.

Well, the GP is describing, what soon might be.

In the mean time, this is the current reality in the states:

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.

Yea, it's cope.

That’s quite unlikely, given the constitutions of various EU countries and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Not to forget the European Human Rights Convention as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), although it's not an institution of the EU but the Council of Europe, spanning all EU states and then some.

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.

Yes, the court can overturn laws that are deemed to infringe on privacy rights but this path takes years. The last time a privacy invasive law was enacted it took something like 8 years to be overturned.

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?

Which country is better?

To add some practical results to that: the Data Retention Directive[1] was struck down by a bunch of national constitutional courts before being completely annulled by the EU Court of Justice.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

There are forces pushing for chat control again and again and again, until one day people are not vigilant enough to prevent this BS from happening. Then it will take ages to repeal and repair the damage done. Once there is some chance to vacuum up some personal data, businesses, government, and security forces will be very quick to grab that chance, and very slow to give that data up again, should it turn out, that the whole damn thing was illegal all along, due to some constitution. The malpractices might continue for years even after things have been declared illegal.

Yea, they only need one successful attempt. I'm still quite not sure about the motivation, the fact that politicians have an exempt from this law is scandalous at least.

Yeah. Fortunately Germany has a quite firm stance against surveilance, for well known reasons ;), and with Germany against it will be extremely difficult to pass this.

Not so sure about that. We have enough politicians here, who don't know shit about technology, or want to seem like they don't and will gladly hold the hand open to be bought by forces, who would like nothing more than get their hands on all that data.

Now I'm hooked. What's behind the smirk?

I think they are hinting at German history and GeStaPo and StaSi.

The constitution of Italy says that we can't use war to solve international controversies. And yet we were in iraq… constitutions are somewhat meaningless if you have authoritarian governments that can ignore them.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-trilogue-u...

> 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.

In practice it _might_ still save you, if the country is willing to pay annual fines to the EU for not implementing some law or policy. But communication tools are always at least a 2 way thing, where you communicate with someone else. If that someone else has their chats leaked due to living in another EU country, where chat control is implemented, then even your constitution will not protect you.

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.

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