Comment by louthy
5 days ago
It’s good for us Europeans ;)
Companies tend not to do illegal things. Especially if they’re public or have shareholders that might lose significant value if found out. And it’s borderline impossible to stop people finding out.
Companies tend not to do illegal things when they're likely to get caught.
The trouble with data laws is that once they have your data, they're the only ones who actually know what they're doing with it. Which means the thing you need to prevent is them having it, which is typically not the thing those laws do.
You can check what data is getting collected (e.g. decompile their distributed app at different versions), and you can - as a government - actually just go to their servers and check what they are doing (with necessary permits and lawful action), or even mandate them to show the source code.
> You can check what data is getting collected (e.g. decompile their distributed app at different versions)
Which only helps if you're trying to prevent them from collecting the data rather than use it for a given thing, which is the thing they're not doing.
As an obvious example, if they keep all your files/messages on their cloud storage by default, they have all your files/messages by default.
> and you can - as a government - actually just go to their servers and check what they are doing (with necessary permits and lawful action)
Which generally only happens when you have reason to suspect they're doing something, which is the thing you wouldn't have when they're the only ones who know that they're doing it.
And even if you do go to look at the servers they have in your jurisdiction, there is no way to tell that the data hasn't been copied to servers outside of your jurisdiction, or what is happening to it over there.
2 replies →
Watch what comes out about Samsung TVs in Europe in the next few days.. the companies do mountains of illegal things because everything devices send/receive is encrypted now and they thought they'd never get caught. After a couple of firmware updates and CA certificate fixes for the eMudhra vulnerability, people will forget all about it and they will go back to doing it.