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Why are Europeans are so much ahead on USA on this? I can guess the reasons but would like to hear what people think. Thanks.

• remify 8y ago
  Be carefull HN being tech and business oriented has a very biased opinion on GDPR.
• robert_foss 8y ago
  Consumer rights are generally valued lower in the US, and conversely Corporate rights are valued lower in the EU.
• superkuh 8y ago
  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.
  • barrkel 8y ago
    Whereas negative liberty by your definition tends towards trouble in the form of oligopoly and inequality.
    • superkuh 8y ago
      Well, it's not my definition. It's Isaiah Berlin's and was the foundation of US policy from 1960 to about 2000. A bit less lately. Do you want to know more? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty
      • buboard 8y ago
        thanks for the link
      • room271 8y ago
        Going further back Mill is probably the better starting point for the negative view of freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill 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).
  • goto11 8y ago
    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.
    • hodwic 8y ago
      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.
      • Daishiman 8y ago
        This is completely invalid. Courts and legislatures in the US regumate limits to corporate behavior in ways that are the complete opposite to what you're saying.
        • hodwic 8y ago
          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.
          • Daishiman 8y ago
            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.
            • 8y ago
  • kazagistar 8y ago
    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.
    • kodablah 8y ago
      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.
• rarec 8y ago
  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.
  • Daishiman 8y ago
    You don't even have evidence that regulatory compliance is substantially different or more costly in either continent.
• mrtksn 8y ago
  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.
• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  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.
• Xixi 8y ago
  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.
  • pointillistic 8y ago
    Except that these efforts are led from the Belgian side.
    • ginko 8y ago
      Hm? What's particularly Belgian about GDPR?
• gaius 8y ago
  Why are Europeans are so much ahead on USA on this? Former Soviet states now EU members have fresh memories of surveillance running amok.
• iicc 8y ago
  Maybe because at the "Federal" level it's not a 2 party system, so it's less vulnerable to special (anti-citizen) interest groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_European_Parliament#Current_composition_of_the_8th_European_Parliament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• kodablah 8y ago
  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.
  • hodwic 8y ago
    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.
• geodel 8y ago
  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.
  • kosievdmerwe 8y ago
    They get to fine billions too, which goes into the EU budget.
• wongarsu 8y ago
  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.
• drb91 8y ago
  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.
• BlackFly 8y ago
  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.
• CiaranMcNulty 8y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU3GZyO_E4g&t=1814s (it's from a PHP conference but isn't language-specific)