Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt. New battering rams have been brought out with the ‘Going Dark’ initiative. But the ambition is the same: to install state spyware on every European cell phone and computers.
In the EU it’s only a recurrent proposal by right wing collectives, in the US it’s reality since time, there the privacy rights are inexistent. Privacy laws in the EU are not perfect, but light years away compared to the ones of the US. In the EU surveillance of privacy data only possible by the police in crime investigations against a person with an court order, by law. Nothing to do with the mass surveillance by private companies for commercial reasons like in the US.
One huge mistake that EU made was to rely on US equipment and software firms to build out infrastructure. I think there’s a bit of a recognition of that now with the push for using open alternatives like nextcloud, but that really should’ve been the approach from the start.
Yes, in part. This is the reason because I prefer to use EU products in the ambit of privacy. Even so, the EU has pretty well forced large corporations to greatly restrict their surveillance practices, with respect to their services in the US. A good example is M$, with only 1 tracking cookie on its page in Germany, vs more than 100 trackers in M$ US
Yeah, EU definitely does a far better job than US in this regard.
Yes, but still a lot of things to do.
Indeed, hopefully more open tech takes root going forward. :)
Agree, but also soft and infrastructure in general. The EU has first-class products and only few of these are known. The only EU browser is Vivaldi (Norway/island), the other one, UR (French browser) is dead since years. Instead of this infamous Imgur spyware (which all people use), using for image and file sharing/hosting, the way better vgy.me (GB) FileCoffee (the best) NL, other companies like KDE (Germany), Proton (Suiss), Tuta (Germany), MetaGer search (Germany), etc… All of these are way more private than most US alternatives.
very much agree