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Comment by rustyhancock

19 hours ago

But we have our own issues outside of the US.

They reality is the average person is between a rock and a hard place.

Major US tech businesses are making money with analytics/ads though, so they would never roll out end-to-end encryption in a serious way. At least outside the US, a lot of E2E-encrypted services are popping up (Proton, Zeitkapsl, etc.).

I don't trust the small number of E2E US services at all. E.g., some of the companies that were/are in PRISM seem to have very convenient 'accidental' backdoors. E.g. WhatsApp doing backups on Google Drive without encryption by default on Android or Apple doing iCloud backups of iMessage that are not E2E encrypted unless you enable ADP. And even if you are wise enough to enable E2E in both cases, most people that you communicate with don't, because they use the defaults, so it's game over anyway.

  • There were four other countries in Five Eyes, and right now the UK and Australia have laws on the books that are ostensibly worse than the Cloud Act in the US if you're a foreign company with data hosted in those countries. That includes me, an American, who uses the Australian email service Fastmail.

  • In the EU, we have been fighting a bitter battle against Chat Control X.Y for some time now.

    That won't change until Ursula von der Leyen goes. Her nickname in Germany (since 2009) is Zensursula, because she attempted to build a pan-German firewall.

    She failed in Germany, but she may yet succeed in the entire EU.

This. When I look at why my life sucks and is on hard difficulty mode, it's not because I use US tech instead of EU tech. Most people and companies have bigger economic challenges right now trying to keep the lights on, than data sovereignty and domestic alternatives. My company just had a 3rd round of layoffs and its wasn't due to lack of EU SW.

  • The lack of data sovereignty does have large geopolitical consequences though. Without data sovereignty of EU government services and businesses, the US can blackmail EU continuously or even worse, in the case of e.g. a conflict over Greenland, cause chaos by turning off access to US tech. So for the EU, tech sovereignty is a matter of life and death.

    Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism. So if we can bring down their sales Tesla-style, I'm all in for it.

    • >Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism.

      Not true. The reason my Col is off the charts, salary low and housing unaffordable is due to EU central bank printing too much money leaving us holding the bags, government's zoning laws making housing expensive and them importing millions of immigrants despite record unemployment numbers to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing. None of this is done by US tech bros, it's all done by EU rulers and elites.

      US tech bros is an orthogonal issue that distracts from the core issues.

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