[dvfjsdhgfv]

To downvoters: I'm curious to hear your counter-arguments. Yes, as a European I have more rights related to personal data than Americans. American companies can continue playing the same old tricks on American citizens with no consequences. It's not possible to do the same to Europeans anymore.

[kodablah]

You were probably downvoted for your the absoluteness of your statement. For instance, you do not have more rights as a European business owner. Even as just a user, you have fewer rights to enter agreements now with these tech companies free from government involvement. What you may call rights, others call restrictions and limitations of rights.

[frockington]

Agreed. As an American, reading the term rights associated with increased government control is nonsensical. I understand the European viewpoint, its just much different in America

[gkya]

> As an American, reading the term rights associated with increased government control is nonsensical.

This is nonsensical. You can not have rights w/o government anyways. You may have privileges or power to force others to comply, but "rights" are defined by a third party entity that enforce them.

[telchar]

You have those backward. Natural rights, at least, are considered to exist before and outside of government. Enumerated rights may derive from government, as do privileges. The "lege" in privilege literally means "law".

Enumerated rights are the rights the GP was talking about. These are defined in law, though may derive from natural rights.

[gkya]

Yeah, good luck enforcing that natural rights w/o any entity to protect you from those who are stronger than you and keen on violating your "rights" for their own good. If I have a gun and you don't, and nobody can enforce your right to life, the chances are that I can kill you and your right to life with a single movement of a finger any time I want. And because not everybody can become warlords, w/o any organisation to enforce those natural rights, they'll only belong to those with more guns. And such organisation, in one form or another, is some sort of government. Calling some rights "natural rights" and believing that they "exist before and outside of government" are just naivety in the least, if you don't have nobody to make sure nobody violates them. We don't live in philosophical wonderlands, unfortunately. In our lands some A. Nix guy can easily acquire data of 50million people in a country and put that to use of unlawful, evil organisations. And just like everybody will kill everybody if you don't have jails to put killers in, these companies will continue on forming and exploiting until there are grave consequences to doing so.

[telchar]

I'm just clearing up some confusion about definitions here, not making any comment on enforcing rights.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

This is actually very interesting. It seems to me that many Americans really don't care how their personal data are (ab)used and will happily agree to absurd ToS-es without complaining. In Europe, we have quite different culture of doing things. And yes, the misnomed "right to be forgotten", i.e. the ability to remove my own personal data from a website, is an important right. Not being tracked is an important right. Not being profiled - ditto. It's really shocking to me that the narrative in the USA is that GDPR is evil, whereas many people in Europe consider it a very positive development, in spite of additional work that needs to be done.

[kodablah]

Put simply: Americans prefer corporate overreach to government overreach. The latter is seen as only needed in extreme circumstances because there is often no going back. It's why you see hate for things like the cloud act and GDPR... it doesn't matter where they are enacted, some people don't want the government involved on these things at this point.

[oldcynic]

Genuine question: So Americans actually prefer the corporate Black Mirror-esque tracking and profiling that has become endemic and out of control over what I would consider a reasonable update to the old DPA?

How is it overreach and how is it solved without regulation? Equally, how is there any going back from the corporate overreach without?

Edit: typos.

[kodablah]

You have deviated into the absolutist approach I mentioned before. You don't even have to do without regulation, just not more and larger. Among solutions there includes: education, enforcement of existing statutes, reduced scope legislation until enforcement catches up, promotion of alternative approaches, tacit support for technical defenses, etc, etc. There are so many more. Adopting this large sweeping legislation is a myopic approach taken by those who think they wield a toolbox with only one tool in it. Sometimes even, if the unfortunate choice is corporate or government overreach, we should not be so hasty to counteract the former with the latter. Work towards it.

[frockington]

Americans for the most part hates being told what to do by the government. For me, I hate it because government intervention tends to cripple economic growth. I value economic growth > social welfare (used in the non derogatory way, in America "welfare" has an immediate negative connotation). I am also aware of this and can understand why other cultures would reverse that equation

[dvfjsdhgfv]

That's correct: government intervention stifles economic growth, be it GDPR or the Paris Agreement. The point is, these laws are proposed where self-regulation fails, and the corporate greed lead us to the situation that is worse to the society as a whole than without it.