[datadeft]

My problem is that I do not want to replace one centralilzed service with another. I do not see any difference between the US and the EU (or Australia) in handling privacy. Most politicians are super keen on destroying privacy for people, for the "good cause". There are so many examples of this I lost count. We need strong encryption and true peer-to-peer networks where the connection is going through random routes (impossible to predict) and there is no government controll of any of the nodes it touches.

[Sander_Marechal]

Perfect is the enemy of good. The EU has it's flaws, but if you can't see the difference between the US privacy climate and the EU privacy climate then you need a reality check.

[piokoch]

Yup, in the USA you can still have VPN server that is not storing logs, something that is simply illegal in European Union countries.

In the USA you can purchase prepaid SIM card in Wallmart with cash, put it in your phone and you have anonymous phone number, again, this is illegal in Europe in a typical stupid European way, as any criminal who needs an anonymous card would pull in to the retailer some drunk or homeless person and get that SIM anyway. But "normals" can forget about privacy, unless they want to play with something like silent.link.

[mmarq]

> In the USA you can purchase prepaid SIM card in Wallmart with cash, put it in your phone and you have anonymous phone number, again, this is illegal in Europe in a typical stupid European way

This is illegal in some European countries but not all. I more than bought one phone and one SIM card with cash in the past.

[mytailorisrich]

There is always a degree of incoherence in people's beliefs and actions.

A good one along the lines of your comment, IMHO, is how most Europeans are very happy to promote ID cards and to be asked for theirs all the time while always complaining about "privacy" and against "surveillance".

For instance in France you must show your ID to buy even a prepaid SIM card, but then again the police can ask to see your ID with little justification. Or how they ask for ID when checking your ticket in the TGV high-speed train...

[Jolter]

Are you insinuating that if you're in the US, you could refuse to show your ID to a police officer when they ask for it?

Go ahead and try that, tell us how it goes...

(No, there is no requirement to be carrying your ID card in any EU countries that I'm aware of. However, most jurisdictions require you to state your identity if questioned by police as a suspect. At least here in Sweden, if you're a suspect they are allowed to detain you "for identification" if you refuse.)

[mytailorisrich]

Why the aggressive tone?

I am not expert in the US, and it has actually nothing to do with my comment, but I believe that police in the US might ask you to identify yourself in some circumstances (which is quite different from having to show an ID).

What I mentioned regarding France is that you must show an ID (passport, ID card or driving license) or face being detained at the police station when asked by police. You do not need to be a suspect of anything to be required to show an ID.

[Jolter]

I was certainly not going for an agressive tone. I'm trying to say that police all over the world will want to know whom they are talking to, especially if you're a suspect. I don't think it's a world of difference between the US and an "average EU country" there.

[cbg0]

Mullvad is based in Sweden which is part of the EU: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy

Obviously, it goes without saying you should never trust something you can't verify, regardless of which country the VPN operator is based in.

[belgiandudette]

I have a few traveler esims from Europe. I didn't need to show any ID and I paid cash.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

In all of Eu countries I visited, only FI and DE asked for id when buying a prepaid sim card. And prepaid sim card days are almost over, as there is Airalo etc.

[fi358]

Strange as I have never heard that you would have to show your ID when buying a prepaid sim card in Finland. And I have also bought them several times and I think that I have sometimes bought them with cash.

[Hikikomori]

You remember Lavabit?

We also have Mullvad.

[jve]

True regarding logs.

False regarding SIM cards.

European.

[chgs]

Not true regarding logs given mullvad is the only half-trustworthy vpn provider out there.

[ianopolous]

You might be interested in Peergos (lead here). It is E2EE, built on a P2P protocol (libp2p) and thus self hostable. We don't have onion routing yet though.

https://peergos.org

[dijit]

For me it's not even about privacy, it's pretty clear that no matter where I host things, if I don't have control of the hardware and the TLS termination then there's no privacy I can guarantee.

However there's still a case to be made for some form of digital sovereignty.

It's no longer considered a complete paranoid delusion that the US could snap its fingers and put tariffs/sanctions on digital goods served from US companies or consider the EU to be proscribed and cut access entirely.

I used to allow myself to think of the consequences of such a situation, after all the US very famously stated that they have no such thing as allies, only temporary allegiances, and as a brit: that is a sobering thought, because we cosy up to them a lot - even going so far as to join them in an illegal war.

However, if you consider the economic harm that would be caused by microsoft just cutting access to Office365, disabling the licenses used or even cutting access to EntraID and managed sharepoints and/or Teams. Most of the EU would not lose billions in lost productivity, they would lose trillions.

What a crazy economic risk, and that's just one product. Nearly all digital services in the EU depend nearly entirely on Azure/AWS & GCP.

Even the ones that don't depend on hosting, still depend on Google Workspace or Office365; both of which depend heavily upon online services which may not always be online during heavy tensions.

I know this is difficult to reason about, but we really have our heads in the alligators mouth when it comes to our digital capability- it will be hard to remove it, and many people are enjoying the echo and will actively fight against attempts for change.