[sunchild]

Whatever trouble Facebook has with the FTC, it will face roughly 300 million times that trouble in Europe, where the rules are much more strict, and the data protection authorities have much greater power to act on behalf of the general public and individual interests.

[Vivtek]

That whole using-personal-information-to-burn-people thing is still (barely) in living memory in Europe. There have been riots in Germany over the government trying to take a census - with good reason.

Privacy is more important than a lot of shallow people imagine.

[sunchild]

Well, the U.S. has its own history of people who shoot at census takers, and so on. From a legal perspective, the EU and member state implementing laws are: (1) more protective of the individual over the corporation than US laws, and (2) fairly onerous and expensive for companies to comply with. In fact, compliance is a kind of red herring, since many of the data protection rules in place are ambiguous or nonsensical. Personal privacy is basically a global policy experiment at the moment.

[anigbrowl]

True, though I have to admit that Neelie Kroes seems to have plenty of both executive authority and the willingness to exercise it in a muscular fashion. It helps that the EU privacy protections are closer to the constitutional than the legislative level.