Comment by googlryas
3 years ago
Pragmatically, to what extent do you believe the European laws have protected Europeans above and beyond how American laws have protected Americans?
Basically, what class of badness are Americans subjected to due to behind-the-times data protection laws, that Europeans are protected from?
It's possible for a company, which is seemingly providing you a service since you visited the site, to make money off a targeted ad in exchange for free video streaming/content/entertainment.
The whole thing has always seemed overblown to me. Websites make much more money off targeted ads, allowing them to do things like allow anyone to upload a video of any length and quality for free. And view other videos people upload. In most cases it seemed to me like a fair trade to make. Yet as people point out all the time, technically a website isn't allowed to deny access to someone who refuses targeted ads (through the cookie pop-up), so they're essentially being forced to provide that user content at a loss. Untargeted ads are often worth 90% less or more than their targeted equivalent.
Privacy privacy privacy though, as if someone at Google is manually looking through your history laughing at you.
> Privacy privacy privacy though, as if someone at Google is manually looking through your history laughing at you.
Part of the problem is that it seems more or less impossible to get large companies to keep their data secure. In fact Google stands out as maybe the only big tech company that has not been involved in a major breach.
Notwithstanding the legal and political issues that arise when (not if, but when) this data gets into the hands of law enforcement agencies.
And yes, there have been individual instances of employees misusing sensitive user data.
Privacy is security.
Generally I agree that content providers should be allowed to make money somehow, but this way has proven to be untenable and something needs to change.
Give me the option to pay more if it lets me get more privacy. Otherwise I keep using fake accounts, VPN, antifingerprinting methods, ad blockers, etc.
Some places do. Many German news sites have a "Pur" version you can subscribe to and not get ads.
You won't get a good answer to this because there isn't one. These no realistic, practical harm to people that this EU law is preventing.
Given your comment history, it’s clear that you’re driven by motivations that aren’t at all universal.
More bluntly, you’ve decided that consumer-surveillance-as-a-service is harmless. I’m thankful that the European regulatory apparatus disagrees. Now if only we could remind the American federal government why regulation is a worthwhile effort.
I believe a part of the data-privacy laws and sentiment in Europe comes both from the WWII and the civil wars/dictatorships/etc that happened across EU. When in our grandparents time (YMMV) the government was compiling list of citizens or checking what they were doing in their private lives, it was not to give them flowers. And while that still sounds pretty far from me, it was also fairly recent in the past so that there's some social residue of the sentiment.
BUT to answer the question directly, credit checks to the level they are performed in the USA sound like a horrifying thing and a total privacy breach for us EU citizens.
European laws are pushing to end Chat providers control over social interactions(which is something that shouldn't be done for profit any way) in the Digital markets act, which forces big apps to provide federation APIs.
The EU with the GDPR made an incentive to not use trackers, dont want that ugly tracker on your site ? Then stop selling data, that's why private analytics like Plausible and Umami have sprung to life. And also made it clear how much tracking is on the web.
There is also finally a movement to let the US host everything because really, the US isn't trust worthy.
So, the EU laws, gave better awareness about tracking, gave incentives to not use trackers, and is now working on improving the user experience by stopping the monopolization of social interactions.
Have you heard of Robo-calls? Basically there are no Robo-calls in EU, because you can just add yourself to a Government no-call list. If any company doesn’t respect that, they get a huge fine.