[Veratyr]

There are two things I'll note:

- As a non-American, I see America as one of the least safe places to store my information. The Snowden leaks showed that the US government has zero respect for the privacy of non-Citizens.

- As someone who's lived both inside and outside America, I've noticed that privacy laws in the US are weak relative to other countries (much of Europe, Australia) that I've been in. Europeans have things like Right to be Forgotten. Americans have companies that have refused to remove my personal information after I terminated my account with them.

[technion]

As an Australian, I would argue the metadata retention laws leave us just as weak as the US - if not, worse. I'd be surprised if the US equivalent of Greyhound Racing Australia had legally mandated, warrantless access to every ISP's metadata.

[Veratyr]

The laws you're likely talking about aren't as bad as you might think. They made a number of changes before it passed that make it more reasonable: http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w...

It doesn't affect:

- "contents or substance of a communication"

- "information that states an address to which a communication was sent on the internet, from a telecommunications device, using an internet access service provided by the service provider and was obtained by the service provider only as a result of providing the service"

When they first introduced that bill it was rather scary looking but by the time it passed it's not too bad.

[technion]

Well I did say "metadata", rather than "traffic content". There are always different way to look at it, but the absurd ease with which groups that are not law enforcement have access to such data is the issue to me.

[Veratyr]

Internet metadata is specifically excluded from retention though:

"information that states an address to which a communication was sent on the internet"

[awqrre]

America doesn't appear to respect it's Citizen's data privacy either, they just have to collect the data indirectly from other countries (I'm not sure how they can avoid respecting the laws by doing it this way though...)