Comment by SilverElfin
6 hours ago
Ugh. Here we go again. Europe’s politicians just cannot stop with wanting to control everyone and everything. It’s as if bureaucracy is the actual goal. Privacy and anonymity should be protected by law. Not violated by law.
I listen to a bunch of (mostly left) podcasts where they sometimes invite members of the European parlement and while I can agree with some of their opinions its downright scary how they think about regulations.
For everything that's wrong in society the answer seems to be more and more regulations. The negative effects (such as the lack of European AI companies) are then waved away (it's because Europe spends their money on American AI instead of investing in EU AI).
It's honestly scary.
Care to share some of these podcasts?
The goal is privacy and anonymity. Removing them that is. They don't care about teenagers watching porn, what they want is to know what every person is reading and saying, and being able to punish whoever says things the eurocrats don't like. That's the reason the age limits are not set in the device by the parents, but you must give your id to some entity.
EU didn't state this for one. The paper they wrote quoted someone else stating this.
EU enshrined privacy in its charter of fundamental rights. GDPR was and still is a major protection.
US, from its biggest companies to the whole of Silicon Valley culture has done the exact opposite.
Within the EU, multiple attempts at pushing changes in opposition to this have been proposed, debated, voted on (and rejected), as democracies do.
Not perfect, but when you come down to laws, EU bureaucrats gave EU citizens article 8, US gave them the CLOUD act.
> Within the EU, multiple attempts at pushing changes in opposition to this have been proposed, debated, voted on (and rejected), as democracies do.
If 51% of people want to do something wrong, they should do it to themselves and leave the other 49% alone. Democracy is not an excuse for doing the wrong thing and going "oh well, guess people want it".
70% is a more likely figure
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
>Almost seven in ten (69%) support age verification checks on platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography.
Sometimes the majority is going to make a decision that you do not like, oh well, that is the cost of living in a democracy. People in "terminally online" spaces like HN vastly underestimate the popularity of these laws.
1 reply →
You need to learn what democracy is then.
> EU enshrined privacy in its charter of fundamental rights. GDPR was and still is a major protection.
GDPR does not protect you from governments snooping on you. The same way it does not stop governments from collecting data on you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It sometimes even forces governments to collect more data on their own citizens like in Romania.
The only difference between the US and the EU is that the EU has somehow managed to convince a bunch of useful idiots (not saying that you are part of it) that it is better than the US when in reality its the same shit just with a different color and smell.
If you want protection from the government, you should most likely emmigrate to countries that really care about that - like United States of America. They spent a lot of time adding laws to protect themselves against the government.
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