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by jyrkesh 1119 days ago
You seem to imply that none of the EU member countries are violating their citizens' internet privacy on a regular basis. I recognize that there are certain countries with _much_ stronger privacy protections in place, and that might not have something on the scale of FISA (from some of the compliance work I've done in the past, Germany comes to mind, but I'm sure there are a strong set of others).

But I'm curious if you explicitly believe that EU/EEA member countries unilaterally _don't_ spy on their citizens. Because I'd be inclined to say that's unlikely (at best) given what we know about the nature of intelligence organizations, namely that they're basically data lake vacuums in the 21st century.
1 comments
danieljacksonno 1118 days ago
The question is what is legal or not.

The US has laws that give them the legal right to snoop on any data about EU (avd other foreign) citizens.

Those laws make it impossible to follow EU privacy laws as a US company.

One of the two have to give, and the US should make exceptions for EU citizens, or rescind the CLOUD act.

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pembrook 1118 days ago
This is the crux of the issue.

It's frustrating how many people are stuck in this loop, where they think any company can "easily" follow GDPR by just swapping data regions with their cloud provider. It's not that simple and never was.

This is a broader political spat between two of the largest government bodies in the world, not about facebook.

The EU is not the global privacy champion everyone makes them out to be. They just don't like that US companies can access EU citizens data specifically (since most of the internet is run by US companies). Whether they're okay snooping on their own citizens themselves is a separate issue--they've also regularly challenged encryption domestically.

I'm also certain the EU is not upset that certain 3 letter agencies in the US have access to Russian's private data when in the context of the war in the Ukraine. Like all governments, the EU only cares about their own interests, not about the philosophical idea of privacy in general.

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