The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.

Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online.

It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.

But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.

And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.

It's not just killing privacy though. Democracy is undermined here by big money.

We are living in a strange mixture of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World

>Fahrenheit 451

We are quite far away from that. On the contrary knowledge is preserved better than ever.

Anna's Archive estimates they have preserved 16% of the world's books, all available to download with an internet connection.

https://annas-archive.gl/faq

On the other hand, I can see the side of Fahrenheit 451 where the people don't value books which is what allowed the book burning in the first place.

Like you said in the second part: people don't want to know anymore and just want to watch "game shows". No one is forbidding anything like in the other books. Doom scrolling is peak Fahrenheit.

If you need to point to Anna's Archive for knowledge preservation, then we as a society are not intentionally preserving knowledge, quite the opposite actually.

annas archive is a single point of failure

>Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?

No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.

Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?

Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.

You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.

Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.

For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.

Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.

If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.

The answer to lies is generally sunshine, not censorship. There are just too many examples of censorship eventually being misused by those in power. The power to censor Russia right now might appear appealing to those in charge, but they need to remember, pro-Russian factions may be voted into power in the future, and they will use this power to suppress information they don't like. Once the precedent is created, it's too late to cry about censorship when it's your "side" which gets censored. No one will care.

To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.

>who will destabilize democracy

Let's just ban those politicians, ban and censor "bad" media and platforms, and surveil all citizens to protect us from those pesky authoritarians!

Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.

>russian influence campaigns

Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty.

Is eroding privacy the only way to combat that?

> Is that a sufficient reason for controls?

no.

Why would Russia be responsible for what corrupt EU officials do?

There is a high chance that corrupt money spreads, which explains 100% of why such laws get in, but I fail to see why Russia should the only or primary actor be here. There is no real benefit for Russia here, but there is a LOT of benefit for those who want to reduce privacy and force transparency onto everyone at all times. Several US companies come to mind and there is cross-state kick back going on here even aside from the USA too.

to argue that the success of the far right nationalists is solely off the back of Russian disinformation campaigns ignores the material reality experienced by far right party voters

Rubbish. Fighting fascism by implementing totalitarian tools is a ludicrous idea.

Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy.

Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.

And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.

Start by dismantling the mechanisms behind surveillance advertising.

You ... Work on aspects of your society that Russian bots can seize on?

Fracture point propaganda campaigns only work because we let those issues fester.

You know EU has mostly gone after and unpersoned leftoids (and accusing them of working for russia), despite the rightoid wringing of hands?

Look up e. g. Hüseyin Doğru.

This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.

Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.

Doesn't matter because Apple will happily implement messages scanning immediately and eagerly. And despite let's say Poland not implementing the bill, all iPhones in Poland will snitch on their owners. Tim Cook's Apple is not Steve Jobs' Apple.

Case in point: my new Mac purchased in Switzerland and activated in Poland on my US Apple account required me to provide my age in the setup assistant. Neither Poland nor Switzerland or the US have this stupid law. Yet Apple is already doing it's part to eliminate my privacy.

Could you clarify what you mean by „required me to provide my age in the setup assistant“? Was is actually required, or optional? Dont they already have your age associated with your iCloud account, or were you creating a new one? Without more details I’m pretty skeptical there is something nefarious here

It was a required step in the setup assistant.

I was trying to setup this Mac with NO iCloud account thus it could not deduct my age from the account.

And you think Google or Samsung will fight tooth and nail against EU not to implement it?

No, absolutely not. From those two I expect even more overcompliance.

I don't think you can nicely divide it like that.

It seems to be mostly bad individuals, or just individuals with some bad ideas they refuse to give up.

Plus the lobby groups that are behind and provide most of the proposal drafting

The issue is that the outcome is the same: whether the Parliament is made up of angels or not, the dealings of the Commission and Council affect the Member States anyway.

True, this seems to be Denmarks project

As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.

Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.

If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.

[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together

Abolishing the European Commission would be seen as an attack on the individual countries' sovereignty as it would give more power to the EU.

Well of course it's about building data centers. There are exactly 3 options for you:

1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China

2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU

3. do without modern technology

Option 1 fails at "how do we take our data back from the Americans" and option 3 is insanity and will fail at the ballot box. So get ready for option 2.

The EU has a lot of upsides, and it's often been a reason to be optimistic about it as a project, but everyobe has a red line beyond which the upsides don't outweigh the downsides, where the slope becomes too slippery to ignore.

If Chat Control passes, I think lobbying for the exit of your country is going to become a very justifiable position.

Corbyn was famously a Leaver, for the reasons we're observing right now, before aligning his position with his base: a Labour Left UK without the antidemocratic corruption of the EU would arguably have been a better country to live in.

Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.

Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).

Let it not be forgotten that when Denmark was president of the Council of EU and tried to push this forward, one of the former colleagues/friends of the justice minister was charged with child abuse in 2025. Just search Henrik Sass Larssen and Peter Humeelgaard.

We should start digging into the lives of those pushing for mandated age verification, chat control, and other privacy killing measures to show the world their true face. The public deserves to know who exactly is pushing for the "privacy law for kids" agenda.

Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.

I can speak for the sentiment in Denmark: most people are unaware of this legislation. A vocal minority of us (who are a little too online) have been trying to educate people, but I think it feels too esoteric. We had a poll last year which asked, "the ability to detect child abuse is more important than the right to online privacy." 65% of people said yes, 33% said both are equally important, and only 2% said online privacy is more important. The discussion for normal people is often couched in the language of "think of the children." Unfortunately, that appears to be highly effective with the Danes.

To be honest, I'm beginning to suspect most people don't care all that much about privacy if you promise them safety.

It only has to pass once, and we have to scream about it every goddamn time try try. And they'll try and try again and again.

>Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).

And without the EU there'd be some states in which it would never be introduced. Decentralization is what made Europe so successful historically compared to large centralized empires like China and the Ottomans, and the EU is destroying that.

What you call decentralization and „so successful“ resulted in constant wars and conflicts. Europe would be in a way worse place right now without some form of union like the EU

> no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences

They do eventually. Ask Marie Antoinette.

> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.

Rightfully so.

Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country in the last few decades. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.

All sticks, no carrots.

There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.

And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?

You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s.

> we really want those border checks back

Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.

The European Union is actually an union of treaties, with countries that sign some and not others. So here you would need to be more specific.

That used to be the case. i.e. if imposing Chat Control on all countries would have required a treaty it would hardly have any chances. However national governments have delegated the right to EU institutions to impose mandatory regulations. You can’t pick and chose anymore.

Not really.

Norway is not EU, it's EEA, which is more like what you describe (the population rejected joining twice in referendums, but the politicians still wanted some treaties).

The custom thing started from basically the beginning of eu, this wasn't done in the last decades, but the customs chargers for outside stuff have been increased by the EU. The large corporations are not reall accountable, Volkswagen screwed up, americans got buyback programms, hyundai/kia screwed up, americans got gas cards... intel scews up (spectre, no hyperthreading to keep safe), europeans get nothing. And yes, there are border checks within EU, just had to show my ID yesterday on the slovenia-austria border.

Why one couldn't have all these without the EU ?

To hold large corps accountable you need clout, and the individual countries don't have that.

Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?

This is global trade and comparative advantage at work. If someone outside the country can produce an equivalent product to what a local producer would make, they can supply it to our market more efficiently than our local producers, and there are no moral qualms (for example people working under conditions that are unacceptable by our standards) then everyone benefits from the import arrangement except for the local producers who can't compete.

From an economic perspective the local producer then needs to become more efficient and/or produce a better product to remain competitive. Alternatively they can do something else that is a more productive use of their time and skills. Again this is just a free market at work. The economic principle is no different if another local producer opened down the road from the existing local producer and they were the ones making the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price.

Protectionism arguably has a place. For vital interests like national defence there is an argument for making certain things locally so you have complete control because of the security implications and because the normal rules of international trade and diplomacy might not be working properly at the time when you need those products. But even in fields like defence and strategic infrastructure and perhaps the most obvious example of simply putting enough food on everyone's plate to survive there are few if any Western nations that don't rely significantly on international trade.

There is an example I always remember from the Brexit debates here in the UK. The Remain campaigners talked a lot about the advantages of being in the EU's Single Market and Customs Union. (These are the two big economic arrangements in the EU that allow member states to trade freely among themselves without tariffs or non-tariff barriers.) And certainly for intra-EU trade they do offer many economic advantages.

However the cost of being under the protectionist umbrella was much less discussed - surprisingly even by Leave campaigners. All member states are required to apply the common EU-basic tariffs to anything coming into their country from outside the union. So when the EU introduced extremely high tariffs to protect the fruit growers in its Mediterranean member states that was good for those growers. But we don't exactly grow a lot of citrus fruit in the UK with our milder northern European climate. We also already had some established trade routes with north African nations that could supply similar products at potentially lower cost and would have liked to increase that trade with us - a mutual benefit for both their suppliers and our consumers that would have cost neither of us anything directly. The EU tariffs made that financially unviable and therefore benefitted some of the southern member states but at the expense of both consumers in the UK (also an EU member state at the time!) and the more efficient suppliers from Africa.

Protectionism is inherently inefficient economically. Sometimes it might be appropriate for other reasons but in purely financial terms it's almost always a negative effect.

Because we don't make those socks locally. They come from the other side of the globe.

For example, i want to buy a phone case... i can order one on aliexpress for ~1eur (free shipping) + 3eur tax + 88cents of vat and pay 4.88for it.

Or I can go to my local mall, and buy the identical case, made by the same chinese manufacturer for 12-15eur. The middleman can order 100 of those cases and since they're the same TARIC code, he'll still just pay 3eur (total) in customs for all of them (3% customs, instead of 300% if you order 1 piece only) and still be much more expensive than if I order directly from china.

So instead of paying 1eur + having 4 eur left over to go for a beer, i now pay almost 5eur, no local beer and 75% of that tax doesn't even go to my country but directly into EU budget. I can afford less and won't get anything out of that money. Yes, there's an employee in that cell phone store, but so is there an employee in my local bar where I can't afford beer anymore because EU took my money.

Why let a middleman rentseek?

It’s not a “middleman rent seeking”, it’s protectionism. If lower cost production is available elsewhere in the world, there are three options.

1. Stop producing locally. Allow the market to take care of it.

2. Deregulate minimum wages to allow local businesses to price locally produced goods competitively.

3. Impose a tariff on incoming goods to protect local producers.

Which is your preference?

Market has already did the thing. In this case it's protecting local retailers who import in bulk over consumers importing individually.

Where is the rentseeking in that example? Rentseeking is the expenditure of resources to influence the rules so you can charge rent. The sock merchant in the example isn’t.

There are two levels of rentseeking in any tariff example.

The first level is the intended rentseeking: we make imported socks from China more expensive so you buy domestically made socks instead. There are various excusable reasons why you would want to do this, but at the end of the day, we are still assigning the class of people who make socks domestically the ability to charge a supra-competitive price, which is a rent.

The second level is unintended rentseeking. Maybe it turns out the economy really, really doesn't want to fund a domestic sock industry. Maybe our sockmakers are just really, really bad at making socks. Or maybe people really, really want foreign socks. In any of these cases, the people just pay the tariff no matter the cost.

For example, Brazil has had extraordinarily high import tariffs on all sorts of consumer electronics. The intent is to create a domestic electronics industry. The reality is, however, Brazil was never going to be able to support that. Electronics are a highly exportable industry and the global market can only support a few countries being involved in it. So the result is that game consoles and smartphones are just really expensive purely for the benefit of people involved in the tax scheme.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

I think he is saying all those beneficial things could be done by multilateral agreements without the need for the additional layer of EU organization and bureaucracy. In fact some of them already have been done that way.

That’s a reduction in prohibitions, not regulation. You cannot enable this without regulating how it works.

This is obviously not the point if the surcharge disappears on packages with total price over 150 €.

> That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities.

Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.

First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.

Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.

Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time.

The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.

Ar they, though? The established longterm consensus is pretty reasonable in the EU, it’s not self evident that things have been going in the right direction on the whole in recent years.

Is it?

The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.

And there're lots and lots of small things like those.

I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.

That can make a lot of sense. People do tent to put too much value on their own experience - there is a tendency to think your experiences are normal.

I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.

And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.

How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?

They would be exempt, along with military and intelligence personnel. So they can enact mass surveillance, stop any form of dissent before it has a chance to grow, while themselves remaining above the law.

https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...

Some sort of perverse inclinations of controlling other people’s lives and knowing what’s “better” for them. Delusional and narcissistic people seem to be generally significantly over represented in politics (another demographic is useful idiots, put those two together and well..)

Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.

I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.

The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that

Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.

What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.

As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.

Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away.

Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.

I'd say the AI powered aspects of it is whats troubling.

We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...

Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.

Dane here, I don't think there is much of a link. The government is usually pragmatic about security, and has long leaned into technology to achieve it.

While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. This is why you see a lot of pro-EU content: many people here (myself included) are of the opinion that the EU needs to be improved, not dismantled.

>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it.

Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?

Yes, definitely. Just as an example, my country wouldn't have a lot of consumer protection laws we now have thanks to the EU. As a concrete example, there used to be a single phone service provider acting as a monopolist and we had the highest phone bills in the EU. When this started to change, it still wasn't possible to keep the same phone number when switching providers, which is a huge thing for businesses and freelancers. The EU forced our government to change this. And I'm not even talking about all the financial help that we got from the EU. Which, admittedly, was used poorly by my politicians. But this isn't the EU's fault, it's their fault.

If Chat Control gets through, it means the Parliament approved it, which means the EU people voted for politicians that supported the idea. If the EU got dismantled, the same politicians would be elected (they won once why not twice) and do it again at the local level. (though, maybe not in every country)

> And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it?

Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.

Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.

...speaking of which:

> and their failures in regulating the Internet

Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?

And because you are grateful for the cookie policies you don’t mind rewarding them with unlimited access all your private communication? I don’t really follow this argument..

> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet

So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?

> false news

For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)

All of those are either illegal already (scams) or easily avoidable without regulation.

> most annoying the cookie law

Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?

And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)

And in the latter case, they could even not put any banner at all and still be compliant. The GDPR requires consent only for tracking.

"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.

I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.

> falling behind the US economically and technologically

Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?

Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.

At least there’s free speech and people are not arrested for mean memes (as is the case in UK and Germany). Burning bridges with “allies” which were taking advantage of you?

Didn't we just have a round of people being fired and arrested in the US for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk?

This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.

as long as your mean memes aren't against the POTUS ;)

Europe is over all far more democratic and safer then USA. Including people actually being safer when they speak.

And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...

Well no.. just handcuffed and left to die after being stabbed (while the perpetrators face no consequences).

> free speech

Democracy only works well when the populace is properly informed and it's much easier for someone to tell a lie than for someone else to disprove that lie. Think of the Alex Jones Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy hypothesis.

A group of protesters got 50 years in jail for daring to exercise their constitutional duty against ICE illegally detaining citizens. Meanwhile the J6 thugs all got pardonned by the literal pedophile in office, and not a single Epstein victim got any justice.

And people are literally arrested for touching a pool

European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page.

>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.

Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.

Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.

Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.

They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.

Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.

Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?

Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to

The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.

99% of the people just click accept and go through.

This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.

Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.

So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?

I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?

The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.

No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.

Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.

I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.

Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.

Only Switzerland has a true democracy

We also have representatives. We call it semi-direct democratic system. There is no such thing as a „true democracy“, it’s a set of principles

>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues

This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.

Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US?

Why is that the yard stick?

I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump

Dear lord

A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind.

Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.

Dear lord… thanks to EU regs, you’re already behind in tech and giving up more and more ground to China in manufacturing (see planned VW job cuts just this week)

The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.

China just recently had to ban their own companies from selling cars below cost.

It's not a clear win for China, their car companies are struggling.

do you have an original talking point somewhere in this drivel that doesn't sound like it's written by a 15 year old edgelord?

The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.

I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.

Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.

Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.

All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.

The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.

It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.

> All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation.

I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!

It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.

> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe

Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.

> simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges

That statement just makes no sense. How can a new standard emerge when legally there is no option to validate its actually superior in the market?

> figures out something better

That’s not how it works. Most innovation does not occur in committees but through trial and error.

> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!

No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.

> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.

You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.

You might have a point. But, at the same time, AFAIK the only manufacturer that complained about USB-C (and, coincidentally, making the exact same argument as you're making) was Apple. And they definitely weren't interested in making the lightning connector an industry standard. Quite the opposite.

It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards. The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...

It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.

They just can't let it go.

Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?

It's an open secret the european union has nothing to do with the will of the people

plenty of people desire something like this, and 'saving the children' is their genuine intent and desire. Humanity is willing to shoot itself in the foot again and again, there's no need for it to be some shadowy cabal.

Plenty of people do want more surveillance, but that's not why EU politicians are doing this. Seeking to implement surveillance across an entire continent cannot be explained by "the will of the people". Danes might want surveillance for their children, but I can't imagine them lobbying their EU representatives to also protect the children in France as well.

This is bullshit. The EU parliament is the organ that shot it down so far.

Read the article. It is the national governments pushing this shit. They try to launder if through the EU because passing those legislations locally would likely be very unpopular.

Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.

Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (no joke).

Related recent discussion:

>European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)

Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland.

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Does governments have any say in this? If not then most MEPs of mentioned countries are too in favor of Chat Control. This is what it says when you click on one of the 4 countries.

There's a lot of flip-flopping. I'm surprised Italy changed their mind when they were very in favour until recently.

I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.

Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people. I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens

We see here how lobbyists undermine democracies.

Amazing how the EU commission does so unashamedly. It's basically the copy/paste system of the USA here. Big money wants laws. They have no shame in buying these laws.

Related:

European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675

This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.

In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.

This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.

A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.

So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.

The recent times showed us that technical solutions are bananas.

Guardrails must be put at the constitution level, or any tech bypass can be just declared illegal.

Delta Chat does that but it's a bit janky.

why have we not heard more of a pushback from business and legal entities regarding privileged communication / protection of trade secrets?

What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing. Useless politicans spending time on useless things.

Chat control takes screenshots of your phone. E2EE is useless. It's government mandated spyware.

So the EU will just tell Apple and Google to remove Signal from their app stores and 95-99% of the population won’t bother figuring out it exists..

They are talking about mandatory on-device scanning. E2E doesn't solve this.

In every authoritarian regime people spent considerable amount of time on workarounds. Underground press, parallel education etc. this is just another iteration of Stasi like regime, just with a nicer suit and better PR.

In reality this should have been rejected wholesale and people proposing this barred from any public sector jobs, or even arrested for terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism).