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There are various takes on that, which of course depend on values each person (and country) considers as the most important. In my personal opinion, Europe (in

• devilmoon 7y ago
  How is Europe setting itself back compared to other superpowers? If anything, by enforcing privacy by design and default it is setting itself up to become the best place on earth to live if you give any value to your personal information
• tyfon 7y ago
  In Norwegian this is called "Føre var prinsippet" or the precautionary principle [1]. This does not apply only to tech but to everything and I personally think it is a good idea to not barge into something without considering it. We've done so much damage in the past by acting before thinking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
  • jariel 7y ago
    "We've done so much damage in the past by acting before thinking." Where has this happened in Social Media? Where is the EU's evidence that FB/Inta etc. have launched products that have caused individual, social harm? We require 'lighting equipment' to be approved ahead of time because people could get shocked and die otherwise. There's no such risk in social media products. What's more, that the EU is being more conservative here, in no way implies that it's citizens are actually 'safer'. For example, the OP's point about cookie notices: they have not materially changed anything other than creating a UI headache. Nobody has changed their behavior due to this notice. In retrospect, there are perhaps other ways this should have been implemented. The EU should make regulations where harm is a real possibility, and ensure that companies are adhering to such laws, but that's a far cry from companies having to provide every country notice ahead of time of product features and services. Every product or service involves the management of at least some kind of personal information, is Ireland prepared to 'review' every feature of every little startups SaaS app, or of the millions of niche little social apps? No. Better to hire some people to investigate claims and breaches of privacy, and to develop good laws.
    • Brave-Steak 7y ago
      > Where is the EU's evidence that FB/Inta etc. have launched products that have caused individual, social harm? You mean the complete loss of privacy? That's a harm. It's not something you'd consider harm, but it's something that might be prioritized in a country that isn't the US.
    • PedroBatista 7y ago
      > Where is the EU's evidence that FB/Inta etc. have launched products that have caused individual, social harm? I'm sorry, wat?
      • logicchains 7y ago
        That's not an appropriate response to somebody asking for evidence. The hate for Facebook here almost seems cultish sometimes.
      • thu2111 7y ago
        You're making his case for him. There's no evidence. Facebook is not harmful. The people who believe this overlap nearly 100% with people who believe conspiracy theories about "Russian meddling" (like the EU Commission). There's zero need to regulate Facebook. It's about the least harmful company in the world today. Its products have no safety implications. If it has an extended outage GDP probably goes up rather than down as people stop goofing off work. It's half way to being an entertainment company. The only reason this comes up at all is because the European political elites are immersed in a form of groupthink in which they cannot and will not engage with their citizens actual concerns (top concern by the EU's own polling: immigration). So they cast around trying to understand why anyone in the UK would vote to leave the EU and come up with some theory about how it's all Facebook's fault, despite that the EU always loses referendums when people are given a chance to object. So now anything Facebook does must be bad. The EU will continue to be dominated by US tech firms that don't care about what the Commission think for the forseeable future. The only obvious change on the horizon is that a new generation of tech firms, having seen what happened to companies that hired too many employees in Europe, will simply choose to serve the market entirely from abroad where they can ignore EU law at will.
• Juliate 7y ago
  Depends on what you value indeed. As a European, I don't feel at all behind the USA. Even less so since a few years, since I see all the very-USA-specific stuff that's been fed to us as "universal", while it was actually more because most of the production/distribution/media means were sourced from there. Exceptionalism is its own curse.
• chunkyslink 7y ago
  Being concerned about privacy is not an Amish Bias, it means our citizens are less likely to be abused by some tech company.
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    And by extension a government, see the Nazis (invoking Godwin's Law here), but also the Snowden revelations - you can safely assume the NSA and co have access to all data held by the big tech companies. If Trump or his even more extreme successors decide that a certain demographic needs to be rounded up, they can requisition a dataset from Facebook and they'd have the list of people matching that description. Combine that with the military + the militarization of the US' police force and you realize you're only one executive order away from genocide. And I don't know if the world will go to war with the US over that.
    • logicchains 7y ago
      So the problem with Facebook is that powerful governments might use their data to do horrible things, and the solution is to give governments even more power over our lives by letting them dictate what sites we're allowed to visit? If there wasn't so much of this "oh no, a problem, better get the government to solve it" thinking in the first place, the US government would never have gotten as powerful as it has.
      • lagadu 7y ago
        > "oh no, a problem, better get the government to solve it" Erm, that's exactly why we have governments: to solve society-level problems.
        • logicchains 7y ago
          Yes but governments also cause problems, and if they get big enough the cure can be worse than the disease. E.g. if all governments in Europe had not had the power to override citizens' freedom of choice by drafting them and taking their factories to make bombs, there'd have been no WW1, saving tens of millions of lives. If Russian and Chinese governments in the 20th century had not had the power to override their citizen's freedom of choice and expropriate their property, Stalin would not have been able to conduct his purges, Mao would not have been able to conduct his great leap forward, the great famine would have been avoided, saving close to a hundred million lives. As the quote goes, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.". People think "oh it couldn't happen here"; well that's what people in Germany thought in the 1930s.
• seek3r00 7y ago
  To each its own
  • logicchains 7y ago
    That's exactly what this law goes against, because someone in Europe is banned from using Facebook Dating even if they want to.
• jka 7y ago
  It's definitely possible to perceive Europe as moving a little slower in terms of technology adoption; it's also possible to argue that that's not a bad thing. A common narrative in western news is that surveillance in China is developing too quickly and that social credit and other systems are being introduced rapidly, introducing societal risk. It's possible that's true - and that the U.S. and sillicon valley in particular - while good at developing technology rapidly - are actually on a similar risk trajectory. Within the tech news bubble it's all communicated very differently, of course - it's about innovation, improving lives, and changing the world by disrupting old industries. But perhaps the systems that are being implemented are, in fact, similar. And to look at the situation from another angle: despite all of these advances in technology, how much has life really changed? We all still have family, friends, education, work, accommodation, food sources and requirements.. there is "nothing new under the sun". There's a lot to be said for taking some pause and seeing how technology develops, and after careful consideration, selecting the options which lead to clear improvements, while avoiding the options which seem to introduce large negative impacts for individuals and society.
  • stared 7y ago
    Well, it is common that it takes years to get services and products that are available in the US. For example, to get a sensor to measure my ECG I needed to: - use US credit card in an app store, - ask a third party to resend me a device. I am not aware of many innovative products or services that are first available in the EU, and it takes more than a year to appear in the USA (examples are welcome). I do not say that the EU is bad, as there are quite a few things in which it is progressive (human rights, environment). > despite all of these advances in technology, how much has life really changed? For some, a lot. If it weren't for the internet, most likely I would end up living very lonely and miserable. (Well, it give me a window to discover people having different religion than my family and neighbors, to discover that I am not the only weirdo, but there are much more neurodivergent people, etc). Each single things progress is not a life changer. Collectively, they change the way we live. Yes, I am aware that one should weight the pros and cons. Just, IMHO, in Europe it is tilted to "way too conservative" (in its original meaning, "preserving"), with the approach more of a government plan (acting in years or decades) than hackathon/startup, where it is an order of magnitude faster. I am the most afraid of slowing the progress of medicine, which do require data.
• itchyjunk 7y ago
  I am not convinced that trading users privacy for any sort of latest and greatest tech necessarily sets you back. This might be true, but it's not a given. If someone shows that the benefits outweigh whatever is gained by such privacy measures, by all means talks about how Europe is falling behind.
  • jariel 7y ago
    "I am not convinced that trading users privacy for any sort of latest and greatest tech necessarily sets you back. This might be true, but it's not a given" True, but why on earth is the government deciding on your behalf what this trade-off is? It's the government's job to make sure the trade-off is apparent, within reason, and then let people decide for themselves. For example, I don't want to be on Facebook ... so my magical solution is that I don't use it.
    • nottorp 7y ago
      Um sorry to disappoint, but you most likely have a shadow profile at Facebook built from all of those like/share/comment with FB boxes on all the other pages you're visiting.
      • jeltz 7y ago
        Depends. If he has been running an adblocker for many years he can have avoided a shadow profile.
        • Nextgrid 7y ago
          Facebook SDKs are embedded in apps (even paid ones) and they report a lot of data including IP address and device info (very useful for fingerprinting). Facebook also collects other user's contacts lists (thanks to dark patterns) which means they can infer his social graph based on his other friends who do use Facebook even if he himself doesn't use it.
    • lagadu 7y ago
      The government's job is whatever we, the electorate, decide it is. The government represents us and we've empowered it to reign in large companies and moderate the influence they can have on us and it's exactly what they're doing.
• Ragnarork 7y ago
  How is that of any relevance to mention an "Amish bias" and go on a grandiloquent tangent about the merits of precaution vs. quick adoption of new technologies, when this is about a dating feature which (obviously) has privacy implications?
• rendall 7y ago
  As an American living in Europe, I actually think that Europe is ahead of the curve with respect to privacy and security. US culture is informed by a laisez-faire approach to business and customer protection, but European governments are generally more proactive in thinking on behalf of its citizens. I don't know why you're getting downvoted so bad. Your opinion is valid and well stated, even though I disagree.
• divbyzer0 7y ago
  Amish or Luddite? No. Underinvestment in technology? Yes. Poor bureaucratic response? More yes. The US is leading in eCommerce with FAANGs. With this trade comes very valuable data mining and 'Surveilance Capitalism' where intimate user behaviours and trends are translated into further competitive advantage. When you look at the FAANGs. The US gets all the upside (as well as some of the downsides), but the EU gets only downsides. e.g. Amazon will hollow out retail and logistics, as well as computing infrastructure, the economic efficiencies are returned to the US as well as the rich user data. The EU is struggling to respond in a contructive way. It really needs to create a few tech hubs, and promote new ventures. Instead, its doing what the EU does best. Kicking the can down the street, and adding bureaucracy to appear to be doing something.
  • thu2111 7y ago
    EU and its governments set the tone, though. The USG attacks tech firms only rarely, and only when there's pretty overwhelming evidence of some sort of specific wrongdoing. The EU seems to pretty routinely attack the tech industry even when there's no demonstrable harm. So tech entrepreneurs in Europe receive a pretty strong message that if they get big they're going to meddled with and certainly not celebrated. US founders don't get the same.
• leftyted 7y ago
  I think you're correct that there's an "Amish bias" at work here. I don't see that as a negative either -- I have a bit of that perspective myself. I certainly prefer a "calm countryside". Overall I'm unsure if the EU is doing good here or if it's just posturing and getting in people's way. I guess the truth is somewhere in between. There are clear advantages to the way the US handles this stuff but perhaps the EU will dodge a bullet or two. I do think it's a wholeheartedly positive thing that the US and the EU take different approaches. It would be truly awful if there were no differences in our attitudes toward technology and its adoption.