[mozman]

Ah, back in the day the FBI would pay our CTO $5000/hr to talk to and work with him. On top of that we would charge them a monthly colo fee for their equipment that collected data of customers.

Sometimes they had warrants, but mostly just bought the data.

A year or so after 9/11 and that relationship lasted years.

[niutech]

Welcome to the US - claimed "praiser" of freedom, but with no respect for privacy. Even the EU is better at maintaining privacy than the US.

[twelve40]

the EU is much more aggressive at banning and censoring websites though. I can't recall the last time I ran into a website in the US that's blocked at the provider level (private moderation like e.g. Youtube is a different story). Maybe Tiktok is the most famous, but it's still around and available afaik. But in the EU, ran into "the government has decided this information is bad for you" all the time, with a nice notice from the internet provider. My hunch is that under various pretexts both societies will continue to drift towards more censorship and less privacy, perhaps with some temporary local differences.

[niutech]

It depends on the country, the EU doesn't have the same laws for Internet censorship. Still in most EU countries it is better than in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...

[fennecbutt]

I've never encountered anything like that while over here.