[nickslaughter02]

> Privacy rights in the EU are being eroded as we speak. Unless people there get off their high horse, they'll succumb to the same level of authoritarianism and surveillance as in the states.

Last time I checked not even the US is proposing to install AI agents on everybody's phone to surveil your encrypted messages (look up chat control, last meeting not even 2 months ago). Soon people will start looking for non-EU VPNs to install Signal (the CEO said they would leave EU if the law passed).

> Also, sorry, but the idea that EU countries are in any position to build a serious hyperscaler is pure fiction. Growth, funding, risk, innovation - those are alien concepts to European entrepreneurs.

Disagree, some of the EU clouds are already well on their way.

[wkat4242]

Yes ChatControl is a worry indeed. But we have been successfully fighting it for a long time. And it is only pushed by a small number of politicians.

Surprisingly enough the drive to do this does not come from within Europe but from the US (Ashton Kutcher and "Thorn"). They have managed to pocket some influential politicians.

[nickslaughter02]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This is factually true:

Chat control: EU Ombudsman criticises revolving door between Europol and chat control tech lobbyist Thorn

> Breyer welcomes the outcome: “When a former Europol employee sells their internal knowledge and contacts for the purpose of lobbying personally known EU Commission staff, this is exactly what must be prevented. Since the revelation of ‘Chatcontrol-Gate,’ we know that the EU’s chat control proposal is ultimately a product of lobbying by an international surveillance-industrial complex. To ensure this never happens again, the surveillance lobbying swamp must be drained.”

Source: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-eu-ombudsman-c...

> And it is only pushed by a small number of politicians.

Including the chief Ursula von der Leyen and her commission.

[systemf_omega]

> Disagree, some of the EU clouds are already well on their way.

Feel free to drop a few links. Digital EU projects tend to be absolute disasters run by bureaucrats. They always result in some 100 page long document, talking about planning a plan for creating a planning framework. Also throw in the words sovereign and digital transformation, for maximum corpo-political bullshit.

[wkat4242]

Sure there's more bureaucracy here but in the end they work out fine.

Galileo works perfectly as a counterpart to GPS. GDPR was also a resounding success.

[briandear]

Is that the GDPR that has polluted the web with cookie notices?

[wkat4242]

Yes but that's only one tiny aspect of GDPR. Unfortunately this is an aspect where they caved in to corporate lobbying, they should have just mandated the obedience of the "do not track" flag (or a similar thing). That browsers set it by default is not a problem because the whole idea of GDPR is that tracking should be opt-in, not opt-out. But really this is a tiny part of GDPR. It is not just about the web even. And as annoying as the cookiewalls are, they also make the user more aware (I mean, why do you want permission to share my data with 572 "trusted partners"??). It also enforced some concepts that should already have been standard, like the purpose principle, explicit permission ("opt-in") etc.

It has really made companies much more aware of data handling. At work we have data protection officers now, privacy advocates, every app we onboard now has to be reviewed in terms of what the data is used for, where it ends up, if we have agreements with them in terms of what it's used for etc. This is really great because before we had pretty much nothing like that. It was just move fast and break things, including customers' privacy that would get broken. And our company is one that doesn't make any money from tracking our customers, so it wasn't really targeted as us, but it still drove so much improvement.

I think it will become much better now that we are disconnecting europe from US services. The main reason that tracking-informed ads are so much more valuable than context-informed ads, is that Google and Meta etc are promoting them. They control the auctions, and tracking is their moat. Nobody has such pervasive tracking networks as them.

The disconnection from these services could really be the trigger for an EU-based context-informed advertising service.