Can any Googlers answer: Does turning off these "history" sliders actually affect the data Google gathers from you? Or does it just mean that the information is hidden from your own account view?
Judging by Google /FB modus operandi I doubt it, they'll collect all. Googlers that really know would probably not tell.
Looks like EU might put the brakes on a lot of this creepy crap. As much 4% of revenue or close to $5 billion fine....$5 billion for this, $4b for another...and all of the sudden we're talking real money.
No, they won't. They've already fined Google billions, but have they got the money? Not a chance. Any fine will be fought for at least a decade (see Oracle v Google) and will end up in limbo forever.
They could fine Google $1 trillion, wouldn't make a difference.
If the cost-benefit analysis comes out that far in the red, Google could just bail, and what would the EU regulatory agencies do? Seizing a few office complexes and a data center or two isn't going to amount to much in the way of actual value. It's not like Google is an old-time capital-intensive manufacturing or resource-extraction company.
Google, FB, LinkedIn etc engage in super creepy procedures and suck as much data as they can. Some to be used today and directly, other data to be used indirectly...or just to be there just in case. Plus, if you read it again, it's clear I was saying what I believe it to be likely.
>>By law, If they say they do not, they do not.
Ummm, no. Justice system isn't based on what the accused says. That's only part of it, called (more or less) the defense. Others chime in too
> Google misled the public about the size of the company’s contract to develop AI for the Pentagon, and its executives chose against publicizing its participation in the project, leaked emails obtained by The Intercept show.
Assuming that they properly stop personalizing ads, there should be little reason for them to continue collecting as much data.
It would especially also be a very clear violation of the law in many countries, if they did.
And since it's opt-out without a direct path to opting out, the number of users that will opt out is probably below 0.1%. So, it would likely be more damaging reputation-wise and in legal fees for them to not stop collecting this data, than to just let those <0.1% get away.
That's what I consider logical and is giving Google the benefit of the doubt. But it's your privacy. You don't need to give anyone any benefit. If you prefer, you absolutely should choose a doubt-free solution instead.
Yeah, despite everything you read, Google doesn't "want your data". Google is one of only a handful of companies that have matured beyond the point of thinking that personal data is, in and of itself, valuable if the user doesn't want them to have it. Sure, there are a lot of companies who profit in keeping data without your knowledge, but they're in a different kind of business, where "delighting your users" is not really an objective.
Google stores your personal data in order to serve it back to you in one form or another. If you no longer want Google to serve that data back to you, if you're no longer happy with Google having a copy of that data, then it immediately becomes a liability rather than an asset. It's like poison in the sugar bowl, nothing good comes from it. Google does not want that kind of data, and there are lots of people whose job is to ensure that no data of that category is ever collected or retained.
You probably want to tell me that advertising targeting is just as effective if data is unwanted, or something similar about hypothetical incentives. But no, the costs outweigh the returns in the long game. This is a dead end.
In this particular case, there is a feature called Location History. It collects and allows you to query you location history. You can turn the feature on or off. But because of its clever name, some privacy wathdog organizations felt like turning this feature off should be expected cause all information relating to locations to be scrubbed from all the history from all the other products and features. That sounds absurd when you say it like that. But when you're dying for a reason to sue Google, you take what you can get.
The irony is that this level of scrutiny is only possible because Google is exceptionally careful about making available to users all the information that they have relating to those users, and allowing users to delete or edit it. They've been doing it long before the GDPR was even a concept, in fact for the most part the GDPR was just a codification of Google's existing (and often unique) practices as law.
The title of the submitted article is deceptive. No countries have accused Google of GDPR violations. Consumer groups in 7 countries have submitted complaints to their country's GDPR enforcement authorities.
> In our opinion, the scale in which Google tracks the location of its users breaches the GDPR. Users have not given free, specific, informed and unambiguous consent to the collection and use of location data, particularly considering the scale of tracking going on, says Gro Mette Moen.
You include the "breaks a regulation" in the premise, whilst in this GDPR case it is what has to be established. The accuser doesn't get to determine guilt.
There are probably millions of people with negative opinions about Google. The number of people who understand both Google's practices and the GDPR well enough to write a complaint is probably a lot lower.
Most people just use Internet services to get things done, rather than experimenting with them enough to know how they work. And they believe rumors.
It appears to be a quote from one of the agencies filing the complaint, which appears to not be the agency responsible for processing and handling GDPR complaints. So, an opinion.
The EU countries (generally) believe in positive liberty where people believe those they vote into power then have the right to tell people what to do for the greater good of some ideology.
The USA (generally) believes in negative liberty which is based around the individual being able to do whatever they want unless it actually harms another person.
Both positive and negative liberty are valid views but generally positive liberty leads towards trouble in the form of authoritarian issues.
So it's really not a US/Europe thing at all - both very much value negative liberty, although it is probably fair to say that Europe also values positive liberty a bit more. It's more about the role of corporations. The US seems to view corporations as almost equivalent to people, whereas in Europe more often they are viewed as quite separate. And Europe has a broader definition of harm around monopolies than the US does currently at least, especially around the importance of data protection (but again both in respect to negative liberty).
In this case the authorities are telling businesses what they can and cannot do. GDPR denies business the right to track humans who have not consented (i.e. the negative liberty to be free of unwanted tracking). So the real question is whether you consider the liberties of business more important than the liberties of humans.
Businesses are just groups of humans. We in the US have constitutional protections around freedom of association and assembly, of which a business is but one example. We extend other constitutional rights to businesses, because to remove them from businesses would be to remove them from the people associating under those businesses, and would thus be a limit to free assembly.
Also, we definitely do not have a constitutional right to privacy in the public sphere for services that we elect to use.
I'd be interested if you could provide some examples of regulation which would be unconstitutional if applied to another form of free assembly which is currently held constitutional when applied to a business.
Businesses have to comply with regulations in the form of record-keeping, safeguarding medical data, determining the composition of its board of directors, etc. HIPAA is not for individuals, neither is Sarbanes-Oxley.
I think I can kinda see this argument, actually. The punishment for violating HIPPA is not placed on the individual, it's placed on the company.
I work for a company that operates on HIPPA-protected data; if I leaked any of that, I wouldn't face any legal punishment but the company I work for would be on the hook for some seriously large fines.
> The punishment for violating HIPPA is not placed on the individual, it's placed on the company.
Be careful believing that; it's true that direct liability under HIPAA is almost exclusively for be covered entity as such, but individuals may be criminally liable for HIPAA violations in two ways:
(1) Certain directors, officers, and employees may be liable under general principles of corporate criminal liability, and
(2) Individual employees (and other inbividuals) not criminally liable under (1) for direct HIPAA violations that have a role in it may be liable for conspiracy or aiding and abetting (the latter of which has identical punishment to the crime it relates to) related to the underlying crime committed by the covered entity that is their employer.
So, yes, actually knowingly leaking PHI that subjects the company to crimination penalties under HIPAA would likely also subject you to criminal penalties tied to that HIPAA violation.
I asked specifically for other forms of assembly. Individual constitutional rights are applied differently than those rights are applied when assembled.
Hence: Is your argument that it would be unconstitutional to apply SOX or HIPAA to non-profits, teachers unions, churches? If not, my original argument still stands. Businesses are forms of assembly, and thus protected by the first amendment.
it also denies people the ownership of their personal data as goods (because what is owned can be traded, and the spirit of gdpr is against the trade of personal data). combined with the exceptions granted to governments for the same kind of trade, it seems like a positive framework that sets the rules of the trade, and derermines that DPAs are the ultimate overseers of this trade.
Property, of course, is the one very large exception. For example, in Europe owning land might mean you can exploit it for farming, but not prohibit freedom of travel across it. In America you can put up barbed wire fence and shoot trespassers, because somehow excluding people from using stuff isn't infringing on their freedoms.
It's not an exception and very much in line with the spirit of mind your own business. It's about the freedom to have your own land free of trespassers and your right to stop them. The general idea, though of course there are exceptions, is your land your rules. Also, many consider trespassing a harmful act.
I would say they're so much ahead because they're so far behind.
True, in the US consumer rights are largely a joke, but on the same token doing business in the EU seems to be a huge regulatory mess for corporations both abroad and internal and it's quite hard to imagine any company in the EU reaching the heights of Microsoft or Apple, or even seeing more adventurous and risky endeavors like Tesla.
Pros and cons to both sides of having such rules. I'm certainly on the side of believing pro-consumer rights, but the lack of them may not be entirely a bad thing from a macro economic standpoint either.
I wouldn't call it necessarily ahead but yes, different. Anyway, as an EU citizen, I will bite.
I'm inclined to believe that our politicians don't fancy to get their reach to the public(therefore, their careers) being controlled by an American organization that would sell that reach to the highest bidder or to US interests.
Also, I think that companies or governments knowing too much about you and then doing bad things with that information is not a fiction but a memory or a lesson from the history books and this helps with the public support.
I think they want to have a rule book in place so that they know how these internet media giants operate and make sure that Facebook is making their money by showing chocolate ads but not selling information to 3rd parties who want to shape the political landscape in Europe.
They wouldn't want, for example, have Bulgaria being targeted by Russia or Turkey and start another civil war in the Balkans through acquiring detailed profile information of the few million people there.
The EU is a bit more progressive and it's legislature seems a bit more functional than good old Congress over here. Passing a law around here is pretty much a joke. And with everyone's PACs, corporate payoff of politicians is at an all time high in the US, so passing regulations upon businesses is a lot harder in particular.
The US is starting to lean towards the realization big tech needs to be regulated, but it's going to take us longer to get there.
I can only speculate, just like you, but I think it has to do with Europe very recent history, in particular on the communist side of the iron curtain (think Stasi, etc.). Half of Europe knows first hand what it is to live in a repressive surveillance state, and the other half has witnessed it.
Ahead or not is subjective. As a USA citizen, I will bite and try not to show too much bias.
1) Simple cost/benefit. The EU has very little to lose and very much to gain by making rules favoring internet users. The US has very little to gain and very much to lose by making rules harming internet companies.
2) Trust. Europeans trust their governments to do good for them compared to internet companies. Americans trust their governments to do worse to them compared to internet companies. It's quite possible both are right. Similarly, Europeans implicitly trust this is not the beginning of a slippery slope of internet legislation whereas Americans very much fear that giving lawmakers an inch encourages them to take a mile. Same goes for willingness to repeal.
3) Enforcement. Europeans know, based on previous incarnations and regulator statements, that enforcement will be lax and/or subjective and/or limited in scope. Americans fear large-scoped laws since they expect enforcement and court battles once on the books.
4) Perceived harm. Europeans see many more harms from these internet companies than do Americans (HN notwithstanding). Americans simply don't believe tracking and data collection of public data is that big of a deal, especially for the tradeoff they get in services they or others choose to use. It's apathy, not ignorance as many here would have you believe.
5) Scope. Kinda the same as trust, Europeans aren't bothered by large-scoped legislation against businesses and Americans are. I suspect you'll see transparency/disclosure requirements one day in very limited form, but I doubt it'll become so expansive as allowing user requests, requiring certain forms/figureheads, and forcing businesses to do business with the user after opting out of tracking.
6) Freedoms. Europeans see a clear separation between consumers and companies wrt freedoms. Americans see companies, especially small ones, as just collections of citizens. Small business and entrepreneur compliance burdens are very much considered by American lawmakers on new law areas like the open internet.
There are exceptions to all of this of course, but I gather these are the general climate differences.
I think the biggest thing is more cultural than related to any specific argument -- it's America's strong cultural bent against busy-bodies.
Whether political activists, art critics, family members, next-door neighbors, school boards, building code inspectors, whatever it is. It's our core prejudice. The French are racist, the English classist, Americans hate busy-bodies.
It is core to Americans that people should think and act locally, as a rule. Basically -- mind your own business.
Applied to GDPR, this philosophy goes;
"Unless you or someone you know has been concretely hurt by these businesses tracking them, why are you trying to make a law about it?"
To an American, when we hear someone trying to fix something that they have not themselves been a victim of, it sets off our busy-body radar, and we prepare to defend ourselves.
This characterization of Americans, followed through to a not-particularly-strenuous conclusion, indicates that "Americans"--you know, real Americans--should have been A-OK with...I dunno...Dred Scott. Or pervasive corporate surveillance, as you indicate. It's a very Whig and very rich lens upon society and, frankly, not one I expect many Americans actually hold. Were that the case, one would not see, say, so many "states' rights" types being so concerned over the bathrooms used by trans people or who so-and-so is allowed to marry (not even just gay marriage--miscegenation laws go how far back?) and the like.
Americans are nosy and paranoid; we distrust our neighbors to the point of societal breakdown on the regular and we just get inordinately mad when somebody cares about our stuff. It's not a "don't scream until you get shot," it's a "fuck you, got mine." There's a real difference here.
First, you're mistaking my characterization for Americans with my own philosophy. That's in error. I am a busybody.
Second, you're mistaking your own partisan lens for what constitutes busybodyness with the American Public's lens. Americans are radically middle, rebelliously centrist, and hate changes when they come from either side of the political aisle.
And so the busybody thing cuts both ways --
- It blocks your liberal attempts at busybodyness (trans bathroom laws, trigger warnings, political correctness)
and
-It blocks our conservative attempts at busybodyness (additional censorship in media, stop and frisk, morality laws).
Americans are/were against laws to forcibly open up bathrooms to everyone and marriages to same sex couples specifically because those things appear/appeared busybodyish. Both of those things are/were changes to the law. That makes them inherently busybody.
Taking the gay marriage debate: it was only when gay folks were finally able to convince America that new laws blocking them would be more busybody than letting the laws die in court, did gay folks win the public argument.
But changes are coming that are great for conservatives, as the left is starting to lose their title of the anti-busybody;
The university social justice wing has taken on the role that the Westboro Baptist Church played in 1990's American politics, the supreme busybody, and Americans are turning against them.
This is deadly to liberal politics, since being the busybody is the worst thing you can be in American politics.
I'm not convinced. Who can marry who and substances you are allowed to make or put in your body are examples of American law poking it's nose into personal matters. Americans have a lot to say about what others should do, as long as it doesn't infringe on capital and property.
> Last time I checked people are free to marry whoever they please.
Untrue, though closer to true than it was five years ago. I mean, gender restrictions are gone, but consanguinity restrictions remain (most people may agree with them, but that doesn't mean they aren't restrictions beyond mutual consent of the parties.)
> Marijuana is legal in the majority of states.
While this is frequently stated, it is sloppy and inaccurate; marijuana is legal in zero states. Many states do not have additional state level criminalization of some subset of cultivation, sale, use, and possession of marijuana on top of the federal prohibition, but that doesn't make it legal in those states in th same way that states not having additional state-level criminalization of lying to a federal officer doesn't make that legal in those states.
(And, in any case, marijuana isn't the only substance prohibited to adults in the US.)
Consanguinity isn't the only restriction on who can marry who- polyamorists still can't marry multiple partners in the US, thus they cannot marry whoever they please.
Well it affects mostly American companies, so no harm in shaking them and take high ground at the same time.
I have seen in my third world nation we have worst vehicle/ industrial pollution in the world, but govt will rain on cigarette smokers like ton of bricks as if it is the biggest issue in public health. But in reality govt act such way because it is easy to legislate while showing people they care.
Additonally to the various reasons mentioned, privacy is more present in the European mindset because it was violated in relatively recent history.
In the first half of the 1940s, the state not being fully informed about what you are doing could mean the difference between life and death. In the four and a half decades following that half the continent was living under an oppressive regime that was carefully monitoring every citizen, and people had to be careful to not disappear.
As a consequence, the potential consequences of a lack of privacy are fresh on everyone's mind. Compare that to the US, which in the same time was dismantling privacy protections on the hunt for Communists.
The USA has been content growing the economy at any cost, and this type of protection simply had no money behind it and would have easily gotten massive political blowback.
I think GDPR receives an undue amount of emphasis here. The history of Europe, the European union and the evolution of its laws make it clear that European culture values privacy and sees threats to privacy as a particular problem worthy of concern.
It has been a slow evolution from my perspective. I came to the European Union around 2006. Facebook started to become popular, myspace was starting to collapse. Smartphones were rare at that time and not really recognizable as such. The internet giants were not so giant at that time. In Eastern Europe during the cold war, spy networks caused a lot of problems for people, and most people in Western Europe were and are still keenly aware of these problems. Note that a right to data protection and privacy existed in the EU since 1995, well before I arrived.
Around that time, a big scandal in the country I was living in was the knowledge that telephone records had been leaked to the security services without a warrant. Bear in mind that such a thing doesn't require a warrant in the USA and you can already see a difference between US and EU culture on data protection. On the other hand, legislation was proposed which would eliminate the warrant requirements... sadly I'm not sure what became of it.
The next big things that happened were extreme popularization of facebook, google creating search bubbles and android and iphone launching. People started to realize that these companies knew a lot of information about them. A sort of right was created in Europe (ostensibly it already existed via the 1995 directive?) to be able to access one's data. A large fight against Facebook was started to gain access to one's data.
That triggered two things. People were astounded at the extent of the information that they had willingly submitted, and people noticed that they were not given access to the information that they had not willingly submitted. As in, Facebook showed you the posts you made, but didn't show you the log of websites you had visited while logged into facebook and a like button was shown. This brought a lot of focus onto tracking cookies.
Enter the tracking cookie law. Most people just refer to it as the "cookie law", but what the law actually does is distinguish between necessary cookies like session cookies and long lived, permanent cookies or short lived cookies for tracking purposes. The intention behind this law was, drive companies towards the use of short lived session cookies and away from tracking cookies. It was light touch in that there were no real fines. It failed miserably; you can blame the legislators, but companies showed no willingness to abide by the spirit of the law and just put blanket consent banners in front of users with only a Hobson's choice.
The GDPR added teeth. With fines proportional to revenue. With definitions about what consent needs to look like to avoid the cookie loopholes. Moreover, the right to delete your data.
TL,DR: privacy concerns eroded in the USA in the telephone era while Europe was at that time keenly aware of the dangers of spy organizations and friends and family spying on you. As technology evolved, Europe has tried to keep pace and define what the right to privacy means in regards to the newer technology.
These are my opinions as a tech savvy, privacy aware, resident of the union.
There's a comparison of the approaches in the two regions about 10 mins into this excellent talk on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU3GZyO_E4g&t=1814s (it's from a PHP conference but isn't language-specific)
to be fair, it's only a claim. not a case (yet).
The national data protection authorities can now actually look into it and maybe make fines for that. however I guess proceeding could take a while.
If you're on Android it's possible to completely block the GPS daemon from phoning home, usually to 1e100.net based on my observation. To do this you can install an app called NetGuard from F-Droid and enable service blocking. This app is non-root, and it uses a local VPN to provide an almost impenetrable firewall. Google's GPS daemon hides itself under a process called "1021" block that and enable notifications and see the connection attempts every few minutes to 1e100.net getting blocked—you don't even need to have any Google services enabled to see the connection attempts occurring.
87 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadLooks like EU might put the brakes on a lot of this creepy crap. As much 4% of revenue or close to $5 billion fine....$5 billion for this, $4b for another...and all of the sudden we're talking real money.
They could fine Google $1 trillion, wouldn't make a difference.
It's a bit of a hypothetical since that won't be the only other option, but that was the thought experiment.
Google, FB, LinkedIn etc engage in super creepy procedures and suck as much data as they can. Some to be used today and directly, other data to be used indirectly...or just to be there just in case. Plus, if you read it again, it's clear I was saying what I believe it to be likely.
>>By law, If they say they do not, they do not.
Ummm, no. Justice system isn't based on what the accused says. That's only part of it, called (more or less) the defense. Others chime in too
I mostly have Dating Adds now.but a few month ago, I use to have a lot of wedding related stuff.
Assuming that they properly stop personalizing ads, there should be little reason for them to continue collecting as much data.
It would especially also be a very clear violation of the law in many countries, if they did.
And since it's opt-out without a direct path to opting out, the number of users that will opt out is probably below 0.1%. So, it would likely be more damaging reputation-wise and in legal fees for them to not stop collecting this data, than to just let those <0.1% get away.
That's what I consider logical and is giving Google the benefit of the doubt. But it's your privacy. You don't need to give anyone any benefit. If you prefer, you absolutely should choose a doubt-free solution instead.
Google stores your personal data in order to serve it back to you in one form or another. If you no longer want Google to serve that data back to you, if you're no longer happy with Google having a copy of that data, then it immediately becomes a liability rather than an asset. It's like poison in the sugar bowl, nothing good comes from it. Google does not want that kind of data, and there are lots of people whose job is to ensure that no data of that category is ever collected or retained.
You probably want to tell me that advertising targeting is just as effective if data is unwanted, or something similar about hypothetical incentives. But no, the costs outweigh the returns in the long game. This is a dead end.
In this particular case, there is a feature called Location History. It collects and allows you to query you location history. You can turn the feature on or off. But because of its clever name, some privacy wathdog organizations felt like turning this feature off should be expected cause all information relating to locations to be scrubbed from all the history from all the other products and features. That sounds absurd when you say it like that. But when you're dying for a reason to sue Google, you take what you can get.
The irony is that this level of scrutiny is only possible because Google is exceptionally careful about making available to users all the information that they have relating to those users, and allowing users to delete or edit it. They've been doing it long before the GDPR was even a concept, in fact for the most part the GDPR was just a codification of Google's existing (and often unique) practices as law.
The title of the Reuters article this is sourced from is more accurate, "European consumer groups want regulators to act against Google tracking". The article can be found at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-privacy/europea...
> In our opinion, the scale in which Google tracks the location of its users breaches the GDPR. Users have not given free, specific, informed and unambiguous consent to the collection and use of location data, particularly considering the scale of tracking going on, says Gro Mette Moen.
https://www.forbrukerradet.no/side/google-manipulates-users-...
Most people just use Internet services to get things done, rather than experimenting with them enough to know how they work. And they believe rumors.
The USA (generally) believes in negative liberty which is based around the individual being able to do whatever they want unless it actually harms another person.
Both positive and negative liberty are valid views but generally positive liberty leads towards trouble in the form of authoritarian issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill.
So it's really not a US/Europe thing at all - both very much value negative liberty, although it is probably fair to say that Europe also values positive liberty a bit more. It's more about the role of corporations. The US seems to view corporations as almost equivalent to people, whereas in Europe more often they are viewed as quite separate. And Europe has a broader definition of harm around monopolies than the US does currently at least, especially around the importance of data protection (but again both in respect to negative liberty).
Also, we definitely do not have a constitutional right to privacy in the public sphere for services that we elect to use.
Courts and legislatures in the US regumate limits to corporate behavior in ways that are the complete opposite to what you're saying.
It is. I don't even understand how it couldn't be unless you are trying to state that doctors themselves are somehow not individuals.
I work for a company that operates on HIPPA-protected data; if I leaked any of that, I wouldn't face any legal punishment but the company I work for would be on the hook for some seriously large fines.
Be careful believing that; it's true that direct liability under HIPAA is almost exclusively for be covered entity as such, but individuals may be criminally liable for HIPAA violations in two ways:
(1) Certain directors, officers, and employees may be liable under general principles of corporate criminal liability, and
(2) Individual employees (and other inbividuals) not criminally liable under (1) for direct HIPAA violations that have a role in it may be liable for conspiracy or aiding and abetting (the latter of which has identical punishment to the crime it relates to) related to the underlying crime committed by the covered entity that is their employer.
So, yes, actually knowingly leaking PHI that subjects the company to crimination penalties under HIPAA would likely also subject you to criminal penalties tied to that HIPAA violation.
Hence: Is your argument that it would be unconstitutional to apply SOX or HIPAA to non-profits, teachers unions, churches? If not, my original argument still stands. Businesses are forms of assembly, and thus protected by the first amendment.
also, businesses are groups of persons
True, in the US consumer rights are largely a joke, but on the same token doing business in the EU seems to be a huge regulatory mess for corporations both abroad and internal and it's quite hard to imagine any company in the EU reaching the heights of Microsoft or Apple, or even seeing more adventurous and risky endeavors like Tesla.
Pros and cons to both sides of having such rules. I'm certainly on the side of believing pro-consumer rights, but the lack of them may not be entirely a bad thing from a macro economic standpoint either.
I'm inclined to believe that our politicians don't fancy to get their reach to the public(therefore, their careers) being controlled by an American organization that would sell that reach to the highest bidder or to US interests.
Also, I think that companies or governments knowing too much about you and then doing bad things with that information is not a fiction but a memory or a lesson from the history books and this helps with the public support.
I think they want to have a rule book in place so that they know how these internet media giants operate and make sure that Facebook is making their money by showing chocolate ads but not selling information to 3rd parties who want to shape the political landscape in Europe.
They wouldn't want, for example, have Bulgaria being targeted by Russia or Turkey and start another civil war in the Balkans through acquiring detailed profile information of the few million people there.
The US is starting to lean towards the realization big tech needs to be regulated, but it's going to take us longer to get there.
Former Soviet states now EU members have fresh memories of surveillance running amok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe...
1) Simple cost/benefit. The EU has very little to lose and very much to gain by making rules favoring internet users. The US has very little to gain and very much to lose by making rules harming internet companies.
2) Trust. Europeans trust their governments to do good for them compared to internet companies. Americans trust their governments to do worse to them compared to internet companies. It's quite possible both are right. Similarly, Europeans implicitly trust this is not the beginning of a slippery slope of internet legislation whereas Americans very much fear that giving lawmakers an inch encourages them to take a mile. Same goes for willingness to repeal.
3) Enforcement. Europeans know, based on previous incarnations and regulator statements, that enforcement will be lax and/or subjective and/or limited in scope. Americans fear large-scoped laws since they expect enforcement and court battles once on the books.
4) Perceived harm. Europeans see many more harms from these internet companies than do Americans (HN notwithstanding). Americans simply don't believe tracking and data collection of public data is that big of a deal, especially for the tradeoff they get in services they or others choose to use. It's apathy, not ignorance as many here would have you believe.
5) Scope. Kinda the same as trust, Europeans aren't bothered by large-scoped legislation against businesses and Americans are. I suspect you'll see transparency/disclosure requirements one day in very limited form, but I doubt it'll become so expansive as allowing user requests, requiring certain forms/figureheads, and forcing businesses to do business with the user after opting out of tracking.
6) Freedoms. Europeans see a clear separation between consumers and companies wrt freedoms. Americans see companies, especially small ones, as just collections of citizens. Small business and entrepreneur compliance burdens are very much considered by American lawmakers on new law areas like the open internet.
There are exceptions to all of this of course, but I gather these are the general climate differences.
Whether political activists, art critics, family members, next-door neighbors, school boards, building code inspectors, whatever it is. It's our core prejudice. The French are racist, the English classist, Americans hate busy-bodies.
It is core to Americans that people should think and act locally, as a rule. Basically -- mind your own business.
Applied to GDPR, this philosophy goes; "Unless you or someone you know has been concretely hurt by these businesses tracking them, why are you trying to make a law about it?"
To an American, when we hear someone trying to fix something that they have not themselves been a victim of, it sets off our busy-body radar, and we prepare to defend ourselves.
Americans are nosy and paranoid; we distrust our neighbors to the point of societal breakdown on the regular and we just get inordinately mad when somebody cares about our stuff. It's not a "don't scream until you get shot," it's a "fuck you, got mine." There's a real difference here.
Second, you're mistaking your own partisan lens for what constitutes busybodyness with the American Public's lens. Americans are radically middle, rebelliously centrist, and hate changes when they come from either side of the political aisle.
And so the busybody thing cuts both ways --
- It blocks your liberal attempts at busybodyness (trans bathroom laws, trigger warnings, political correctness)
and
-It blocks our conservative attempts at busybodyness (additional censorship in media, stop and frisk, morality laws).
Americans are/were against laws to forcibly open up bathrooms to everyone and marriages to same sex couples specifically because those things appear/appeared busybodyish. Both of those things are/were changes to the law. That makes them inherently busybody.
Taking the gay marriage debate: it was only when gay folks were finally able to convince America that new laws blocking them would be more busybody than letting the laws die in court, did gay folks win the public argument.
But changes are coming that are great for conservatives, as the left is starting to lose their title of the anti-busybody;
The university social justice wing has taken on the role that the Westboro Baptist Church played in 1990's American politics, the supreme busybody, and Americans are turning against them.
This is deadly to liberal politics, since being the busybody is the worst thing you can be in American politics.
Last time I checked people are free to marry whoever they please.
> substances you are allowed to make or put in your body
Marijuana is legal in the majority of states.
Sure these developments are recent but the reason they happened is because as the parent said, American's hate busy bodies.
Yes, as of 2015. What about before then? For all those years, "free to marry whoever" was not the law
> Marijuana is legal in the majority of states
Only 11 states actually have marijuana legal for recreational use. See http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/state-marij...
Untrue, though closer to true than it was five years ago. I mean, gender restrictions are gone, but consanguinity restrictions remain (most people may agree with them, but that doesn't mean they aren't restrictions beyond mutual consent of the parties.)
> Marijuana is legal in the majority of states.
While this is frequently stated, it is sloppy and inaccurate; marijuana is legal in zero states. Many states do not have additional state level criminalization of some subset of cultivation, sale, use, and possession of marijuana on top of the federal prohibition, but that doesn't make it legal in those states in th same way that states not having additional state-level criminalization of lying to a federal officer doesn't make that legal in those states.
(And, in any case, marijuana isn't the only substance prohibited to adults in the US.)
I have seen in my third world nation we have worst vehicle/ industrial pollution in the world, but govt will rain on cigarette smokers like ton of bricks as if it is the biggest issue in public health. But in reality govt act such way because it is easy to legislate while showing people they care.
In the first half of the 1940s, the state not being fully informed about what you are doing could mean the difference between life and death. In the four and a half decades following that half the continent was living under an oppressive regime that was carefully monitoring every citizen, and people had to be careful to not disappear.
As a consequence, the potential consequences of a lack of privacy are fresh on everyone's mind. Compare that to the US, which in the same time was dismantling privacy protections on the hunt for Communists.
It has been a slow evolution from my perspective. I came to the European Union around 2006. Facebook started to become popular, myspace was starting to collapse. Smartphones were rare at that time and not really recognizable as such. The internet giants were not so giant at that time. In Eastern Europe during the cold war, spy networks caused a lot of problems for people, and most people in Western Europe were and are still keenly aware of these problems. Note that a right to data protection and privacy existed in the EU since 1995, well before I arrived.
Around that time, a big scandal in the country I was living in was the knowledge that telephone records had been leaked to the security services without a warrant. Bear in mind that such a thing doesn't require a warrant in the USA and you can already see a difference between US and EU culture on data protection. On the other hand, legislation was proposed which would eliminate the warrant requirements... sadly I'm not sure what became of it.
The next big things that happened were extreme popularization of facebook, google creating search bubbles and android and iphone launching. People started to realize that these companies knew a lot of information about them. A sort of right was created in Europe (ostensibly it already existed via the 1995 directive?) to be able to access one's data. A large fight against Facebook was started to gain access to one's data.
That triggered two things. People were astounded at the extent of the information that they had willingly submitted, and people noticed that they were not given access to the information that they had not willingly submitted. As in, Facebook showed you the posts you made, but didn't show you the log of websites you had visited while logged into facebook and a like button was shown. This brought a lot of focus onto tracking cookies.
Enter the tracking cookie law. Most people just refer to it as the "cookie law", but what the law actually does is distinguish between necessary cookies like session cookies and long lived, permanent cookies or short lived cookies for tracking purposes. The intention behind this law was, drive companies towards the use of short lived session cookies and away from tracking cookies. It was light touch in that there were no real fines. It failed miserably; you can blame the legislators, but companies showed no willingness to abide by the spirit of the law and just put blanket consent banners in front of users with only a Hobson's choice.
The GDPR added teeth. With fines proportional to revenue. With definitions about what consent needs to look like to avoid the cookie loopholes. Moreover, the right to delete your data.
TL,DR: privacy concerns eroded in the USA in the telephone era while Europe was at that time keenly aware of the dangers of spy organizations and friends and family spying on you. As technology evolved, Europe has tried to keep pace and define what the right to privacy means in regards to the newer technology.
These are my opinions as a tech savvy, privacy aware, resident of the union.
It's in effect since 2016. I wish there was better research in these articles...