Comment by bradley13

I read an article that dug into public GDPR cases, which is a surprisingly small set, and it explained they have had a near zero impact on the massive advertising and data broker industry. They mostly just have a large back log of legal cases against large US companies like Google which occasionally result in fines - but even that moves very very slowly and has little impact on their global business models. They do also occasionally charged a few smaller European companies a few grand for violations.

The key thing is that companies like Google and Meta run giant ad networks, there's many thousands of companies buying ads then collecting data in their own systems and reselling it.

The privacy issues of data retention on Google/Meta/etc social and SaaS platforms is something to care about but it is only a small piece of the puzzle of data privacy.

Ads will remain a major business for the foreseeable future as nobody is going to pay $5/m to use Instagram with no data collection.

I think the US basically sees DMA, GDPR, etc as a tariff

> But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have against state surveillance.

Me neither. Lately the EU Commission came up with a plan to create an inventory of every single valuable items owned by every single EU citizen: from Magic The Gathering and Pokemon cards to jewelry/heirloom, paintings, gold and silver coins/bars, cryptocurrencies coins, watches, cars, boats, etc. Anything with some value: would go in the inventory. The European Parliament asked the question: "Can you guarantee us this will never ever be used as a basis to confiscate these items?" to which the European Commission answered: "No, we cannot guarantee that".

That's basically where we're at in the EU now.

Full commie style inventory of every single item with any value. And it's obvious that either taxation of confiscation is the end goal.

It's not passed yet as a law, but that's the kind of thing the EU Commission has its busy bees working on.

If I have to choose: as an EU citizen I'm not just a bit but much more comfortable with my data in the hands of US companies than EU ones. Now of course I'd prefer my data to be neither with Uncle Sam nor with the EU but that's not realistic.

Yeah, because the US can't deal with their criminals my data privacy has to be violateb by a foreign, hostile government.

It's not clear on my end what scenario you're talking about here.

Are you talking about a potential situation where a Drugs-R-Us are using (for example) an American service, but directing them to store it on EU servers?

Or are you talking about Drugs-R-Us using a non-American service in general?

There has always been alternatives within the EU. In addition, law enforcement entities in the US and EU have always been cooperating.

The internet however is not limited to US and EU. Criminals have always been using services all over the globe.

You think EU does not have any law enforcement?

Interpol, European authorities, international mandates, police force cooperation,...

> Then they can put all their data in EU servers and not worry US authorities can look at it even with a valid warrant and a court order.

Ah, Americans. "Valid warrants and court orders" are national. Unless there are international agreements (of which there are many), whatever Bumf** PD, Oregon does should have no impact on what a Lithuanian server hosting company does. Of course, this is not how it works in real life and many non-Americans consider that abusive, and rightfully so.

FYI - this kind of extra-territoriality was what started WW1. An ethnic Serb Bosnian (Gavrilo Princip) shot the Austro-Hungarian heir apparent and as a result Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum.

The ultimatum contained lots of harsh terms, which Serbia accepted, except for 1. The term they refused was to allow Austro-Hungarian police, prosecutors, judges to directly investigate, arrest, prosecute and imprison Gavrilo's possible collaborators. And the reason they refused that was because it's basically giving up sovereignty. Once you let another country send their police force investigate, arrest, prosecute and imprison whomever they want, they have full control. They can imprison your prime minister and you have no recourse except for starting a war.

So Serbia accepted that if it wanted to remain independent, it would have to accept fighting a war.

what we need to do is put some heavy tariffs on intercontinental packets.

What if it's for crimes like... a terminated pregnancy (considered a crime in many states)? Or the "Unamerican" act of calling Trump a cunt?

> Then they can put all their data in EU servers and not worry US authorities can look at it even with a valid warrant and a court order.

I have yet to see the EU ignore a valid judicial warrant except in the most extreme cases.

The point, however, is that you have to have a valid judicialwarrant and not some random-ass piece of paper generated by Adderall-addled sycophants of fascist South African nepobabies.

I am not sure if you meant to say what you said.

By many measures Europe is in fact pretending to be sovereign. I think it is what they are attempting to do at the moment, "stop pretending to be sovereign" and actually BE sovereign. At least that seems to be the claimed attempt.

If anyone is not sure why I would say that Europe is not sovereign, I will answer that question if you ask, but considering the current state of things and even just this discussion about data sovereignty and other related topics about using and deploying European technologies; I suspect most, if not all have a sense that Europe is in fact not sovereign... and that's without even pointing out huge elephants in the room like the 275 US military installations across Europe, and not even to touch on the fact that NATO is really just ** pulls curtain back ** SURPRISE! ... America, Europe Division.