Comment by superxpro12
12 hours ago
The paradox between supporting consumer rights with actions like universal usb-c adoption, but also complete elimination of any privacy rights at all. Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.
There are e2ee chats. There are some parties/politicians who want to get rid of them, but so far they are proposals. If/when these things go beyond committee stage, politics and democracy need to do their job and be sensible.
PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.
> PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.
This is not true. Whether you believe that FISA courts have teeth, or whether 3 letter agencies abide by the law, in most of Europe you do not even have the pretense of this. UK/FR and to a lesser extent DE are all much worse.
The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015, and the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption for domestic surveillance.
The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US.
> Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption for domestic surveillance.
Let's not forget that Chat Control is pushed by US non-profit Thorn, and implemented by software that this non-profit develops! Furthermore, if you look at how this software actually works (even in "self-hosted" setup it sends hash values to Thorn's servers [1]), it's pretty clear that this tech could easily be abused to perform surveillance on the EU from within the US.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260721220432/https://get.safer...
> Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption
Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries.
> The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015
So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore, is that what you believe?
> the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". [...] Europe continues to push policies [...] for domestic surveillance.
So if it's surveilling allies, it's all good in your opinion?
> The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US.
"Far far"? Do you even realise that Europe is not one single country? The US elected Trump, twice.
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E2EE are are alive for maybe a few more years tops, until Chat Control 2.0 is voted in. ADDW enables mandatory spying camera in every new car. EU AI act allows AI surveillance without any court order (the only tiny useless hurdle is to record video first and then observer can use AI on the records at will). eIDAS2 allows legal MITM browser certificate attacks. Media Freedom Act (duh) allows deploying spyware against journalists in cases of "national security", as usual vague and undefined. And the list goes on.
Modern day EU, over the past 5 years or so is just as bad anti-privacy as USA, for no clear benefit too. Just surveillance for surveillance sake.
> but so far they are proposals
That is false. They are not proposals, they are being actively discussed in trilogues which is way way past proposal stage.
Chat control V2 trilogue negotiation was last week and it included mass scanning of messages and private data. Thankfully the EU parliament rejected the idea but every 6 months like clockwork it comes back. The next trilogue is in November.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-trilogue-u...
If this was passed, it would force every single cloud provider and e2e chat provider to keep, filter and pass on your private information to Europol and other security agencies.
The trilogues are the standard informal step when the Commission submits a proposal. It remains a proposal until it is rejected or approved. The formal next step after submitting a proposal is the Parliament’s first reading [0], which hasn’t concluded yet (the Parliament hasn’t adopted a position yet). So it’s still in the proposal stage.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...
Quote:
1. Where reference is made in the Treaties to the ordinary legislative procedure for the adoption of an act, the following procedure shall apply.
2. The Commission shall submit a proposal to the European Parliament and the Council.
First reading
3. The European Parliament shall adopt its position at first reading and communicate it to the Council.
[many more items]
Item 3 hasn’t happened yet.
Isn't that just the recent highly controversial Chat Control push? Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.
Privacy in certain domains is better protected than others.
> Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.
Please, like what? GDPR?
Let's just say you won't find my name, address, my yearbook pictures, history of where I lived, anywhere on the internet. I can quite easily get this information for all distant cousins in the US. And that has been the case long before GDPR was a thing. The culture around privacy is simply different.
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Yes, GDPR.
The US, at least in spirit is all about individual freedom, including freedom of being an asshole, and also the freedom of punching that asshole in the face, metaphorically speaking.
Europe values freedom too, but not as much as making sure people are not assholes. So, freedom of being an asshole is not a thing in Europe, and the government does the punching in the face so that you don't have to.
Which is best is honestly debatable. It is the usual question about the individual vs the collective. The US is on the individualist side, East Asia is on the collective side, Europe is somewhere in the middle.
> the freedom of punching that asshole in the face, metaphorically speaking.
This is not at all a freedom in the US. “The right to swing your fist ends at someone else’s nose.” You don’t get to harm someone else just for being “an asshole”. You can be an asshole back but you don’t get to violate their rights.
Do you understand what "metaphorically speaking" means?
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I can't think of any e2ee app that's banned in the EU. I know Signal and WhatsApp are not.
Also you can get to jail for making fun of politicians where saying the same thing would be free speech in the US.
In the US you just get thrown in immigration detention for a few weeks instead.
Something that Europe should learn to do since they are being completely ravaged by illegal immigration. And I am saying this as an European.
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Depends on how you define 'fun'. If making fun is something like 'he should be killed', yes, you could end up in jail. Good
What reasonable person would define this as fun?
on the other hand europe doesnt have roving gangs of masked gunmen violently abducting people based on ethnicity (at least not not in the last 80 years....)
ICE?
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Speaking in favour of peace in Palestine can get you thrown out of the country.
I know what you're going to say: not a citizen. But first they came for the foreigners, then...
?
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-could-scrap-law-banning-insult...
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You have a very distorted perception of the state of privacy rights in Europe.
As an American living in Europe, it's generally Europeans who have a distorted perception. Most Americans know the bill of rights and the 1st/4th/5th amendments. Many Americans will know of the Patriot Act/NSA/Snowden revelations.
The same is not true of Europeans and they generally believe their rights are much stronger than they are. Most Brits are not aware of the true nature of the Investigatory Powers Act. Most Frenchmen are not aware of Article L851-3.
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Well, the GP is describing, what soon might be.
In the mean time, this is the current reality in the states:
One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057
I dont buy this "europe not free" nonsense.
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That’s quite unlikely, given the constitutions of various EU countries and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
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I don't think it's a paradox because the EU is not a single actor. Just like any government, they do some good and some bad things.
Those two examples are not opposite. They're both examples of governments crippling freedom.
The main reason that governments forcing USB-C is widely seen as good is because it limits the freedom of big corporations, which don't elicit much sympathy, but the principle is the same.
What? I I’m in Europe and I use e2ee daily. The reason you hear about this imho is that we have strong protections and you hear when someone tries to break them.
dude, yes some countries in the EU are "trying" to include backdoors, and e2ee chats are not going away. Meanwhile in the US, you have literally cameras watching everywhere you move, snitching to the police and Palantir and probably all the other 3 letter institutions, and you complain about privacy rights in the EU? With so many other stuff you could have pointed out? lol, rofl even
The much maligned GDPR gives stronger privacy rights than anything the US has
> Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.
?
You just made that up.
I'm sorry, but you should really read up about the laws in the US and in Europe. U laws are a lot more easy on spying agencies and spyware companies like Google and Facebook than European laws. Backdoors: ask the CIA about random number generators. Surveillance: heard of the cloud act?
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>universal usb-c adoption
Literally brain dead to not support this
Couldn’t have picked a worse example
Dude you need to talk to real people and not just get all your information from right wing internet sites. You sound ridiculous. You think signal and PGP don't exist in Europe? You actually believe Europe is a surveillance state? Fucking hell dude, quit you job and go travel. Meet some real people from outside of America.
In EU, it's politician > industrialist >>> EU citizen > outsiders.
It's almost never only about consumers. Via tech regulations, they protect European incumbents first in effect. They see US is ahead and make laws to destroy their moats. If Apple was in EU, you wouldn't have saw universal usb-c, because it would have hurt an EU company. But the more you look at how tedious is for a non-EU company to sell to EU customers, the exemptions they don't get, the specialists fees they got to put on the table, you'll see EU is more coherently described as protectionist than pro-consumer.
First of all - if it was true then it wouldn’t be much worse than US or China.
But in general, people usually complain the exact opposite of what you’re saying - that the regulations we have handicap our companies.
They handicap our little companies more than the incumbents. The Commission itself acknowledged that regulatory costs affect SMEs proportionally more than bigger competitors [0] and the OECD explicitly found that policy failures and regulatory barriers tend to hurt startups more than incumbents [1][2]. The way I see the broader pattern is: more regulation -> larger bureaucracy -> larger bureaucracy has more scope and more incentive to regulate -> incumbent absorb growing compliance burden easily -> entrants get hit harder + ad-hoc regulations to hurt established outsiders even harder.
[0] TOOL #22. THE "SME TEST": https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5d2011d7-5470...
[1] No Country for Young Firms? https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/no-country-for-young-fi...
[2] OECD, about Germany 2025, e.g.: 'Industrial and labour market policies have tended to favour incumbents and hampered the reallocation of resources to young and innovative firms, weighing on allocative efficiency and slowing down structural change' (https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...)