22 ms·

New EU Law Removes Digital Privacy

295 points by zajio1am 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago
This is very nicely presented. Anyone got any links to the other side of this same argument, hopefully as well presented, so us readers can read both to come to our own conclusions?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  The other side does not need to present their case to the populace, they will push and decide against their will anyway.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
libertine 5y ago
After GDPR this simply makes no sense. Basically the EU is saying, companies can't do it... but we can!
- bengale 5y ago
  I'm not sure it's what I'd want to happen, but it's not really that strange. There are plenty of things we allow the state to do that we wouldn't allow companies to also do.
  - libertine 5y ago
    >There are plenty of things we allow the state to do that we wouldn't allow companies to also do. That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part. GDPR was about EU citizens rights and privacy. In fact they uphold public institutions to these standards, and have issued fines.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      > That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part. How is that hypocritical. We allow the state to have organized groups with automatic weapons and tanks, and don't allow private individuals or corporations to.
      - libertine 5y ago
        Really? Is that the path you're choosing to go: that everything is justifiable because governments can have nuclear reactors and you can't? But I'll go the extra mile: it's hypocritical because it's a citizen right within EU, it's a double standard, and it's being enforced on public/private organizations. You can't have rights and not have rights at the same time, you either have them or you don't. In EU there are no rights for owning automatic weapons, nuclear reactors, organized armed groups, etc etc.
        HWR_14 5y ago
        My point was that we allow governments to have powers we don't allow private entities to have. The ability to use force, to detain you, to take your land even if you don't want them to, etc. My point is that hypocrisy is a strange argument, because we already have a huge amount of things that the government can do, even if they would otherwise violate property rights/freedom of movement/etc, that private entities cannot.
        libertine 5y ago
        >Definition of hypocrisy >1: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel After years of propaganda, debates and discussion for data protection and privacy rights for EU citizens, and approving such rights by law, you don't think it's hypocrisy that they approve a law that strips citizens from such rights. They believe people have the right to have their data protected and to know what data is being collected, and demand collectors and processors to not hoard data and take only what is necessary. This is literally bulk collecting of chat logs and process them, without people consent. I still don't get your point, there are no rights for citizens to use force, detain others or take land. At least in the EU countries I know. So what rights are being stripped from citizens? It's the same if the USA government said they will abide by the people's rights to own weapons, but decided to ban the sales of all weapons so people can't buy them.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Pretty sure most constitutions forbid the state to put people under surveillance. The EU doesn't have that so it is valid to ask what the EU actually still provide to its citizens. There is in fact a battle right now over who has primacy here. Allegedly it is everyone against Poland, but the details are more nuanced.
- emteycz 5y ago
  No, you just didn't read full GDPR. It contains countless instances where it explicitly says they can do it, or the companies have to do it for them. Seems like data control was just the first step to data management.
- VMG 5y ago
  it makes total sense if you realize it is all about control
  - viseztrance 5y ago
    Control for whom? Before gdpr the general stance in the industry was we never delete user data, just mark a field saying its deleted in the db and that's that. It's been a total shift. And it's not just that, I've seen first hand that even internal communication about customers are treated with more care as they can legally request all their data.
    - VMG 5y ago
      Control for bureaucrats is the primary goal. If there is some temporary marginal privacy benefit for users, it is a side effect.
- djbebs 5y ago
  That seems very in line with GDPR and it's carve outs for the EU and member state governments
- bobcostas55 5y ago
  Think of it as a stationary bandit trying to limit various upstarts that might threaten his position.
iso1210 5y ago
"Over 80% of respondents oppose its application to end-to-end encrypted communications" I suspect that is nothing like the actual feeling of the residents of the EU
- cbg0 5y ago
  Why would you suspect that? 77.5% of the respondents were EU citizens.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    "We asked 100 people who were interested enough to write to their MEP about digital privacy and 80% of them said digital privacy was important" People who are motivated enough to know and comment about these proposals are not a representitive sample of the population. If you were to stand outside Old Trafford and ask people who the best football team in the UK is, you'll get the vast majority saying Manchester United. Do the same thing in London and you'll get people saying it's Arsenal. Aside from both being wrong, you can see the bias. Accredited polling companies adjust results to minimise sample bias, but even then have to be careful to avoid leading questions as shown in this 'documentary': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
pedroma 5y ago
Mild NSFW warning.
- yakubin 5y ago
  What do you mean?
  - pedroma 5y ago
    There's a cartoonized picture of women's breasts on that page.
thoughty 5y ago
Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan horse called CSAM.
- xvector 5y ago
  Surprise surprise, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were right all along, but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor.
  - csomar 5y ago
    > but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor. The term useful idiots come to mind. There is no lack of them.
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
    - xvector 5y ago
      Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance, and many are perfect for anonymity (Monero). Tor is open-source and can be audited for government backdoors.
      - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
        > Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance Mostly Monero. Paying for censored content with Bitcoin can be traced back to you and will get you in jail the same as paying via bank transfer. And Monero is the odd one out here -- most other cryptos don't really help against censorship resistance.
      - 5y ago
AnssiH 5y ago
Note that there isn't yet any concrete proposed legislation for mandatory screening, if there ever will be any - there's only the linked initiative requesting comments (https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12726-Fighting-child-sexual-abuse-detection-removal-and-reporting-of-illegal-content-online_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...). I strongly believe such a legislation would not be able to pass EU parliament if it would require actually breaking E2E encryption.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  The parliament is not making the laws the EU. The not elected European Commission and the not elected European Council do. That's why we over here call it a democracy-simulation. Breyer is one of the very few trustworthy people in that system. One should listen to his concerns as they're real.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I don't think the EU parliament hat the integrity or competency to evaluate the repercussion of such a law. So no, I don't think the parliament is a trustworthy democratic defense, if they get a say at all that is.
tom7 5y ago
How will they monitor my emails from russian servers to russian servers?
zaik 5y ago
How will this be implemented? Will my XMPP client/gpg binary become illegal?
raverbashing 5y ago
This was already posted some days ago, I though HN had a dupe detector but for some reason it let it through. I have several qualms about this proposal but the crying-wolf manner it is being presented is just ridiculous. The author could have used the opportunity to raise the real risks (especially the false positive risks) instead of pushing for fear-mongering.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  Can you post a reply with substance instead of vaguely tone-policing?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  On principle I would agree. But such laws are so often carried on the back of fear-mongering that I just don't care about making an honest argument about it. It will be ignored anyway, in fact any serious technical advisor was ignored. So why not just reject everything that comes forward here? Spite politics work at least and have an impact. Not only positive, but that isn't in the hands of any honest critic.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
this has been addressed several times here on HN in the past and it's still false. No one removed digital privacy in EU. The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members, Breyer is the only German that was elected and the only one from a western European country. They need to get titles on newspapers, they're good at doing it, but sometimes they go on a hyperbole. Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it. If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each one of them lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop. To add some more details: this is not a private company spying on its users, this is a coalition formed by 25 sovereign countries passing a law that harmonize the different legislation around searching for potentially unlawful digital communications. But the article 5a) specifically states that > Notwithstanding their legitimate objective, these activities constitute an interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private and family life and protection of personal data of all users. Any limitation to the fundamental right to respect for private and family life, including the confidentiality of communications, cannot be justified merely on the ground that certain technologies were previously deployed when the services concerned did not, from a legal perspective, constitute electronic communications services. Such interference is only possible under certain conditions. It needs to be provided for by law, respect the essence of the rights to private and family life and to the protection of personal data and, in compliance with the principle of proportionality, be necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others as enshrined in Article 52 (1) of the Charter. Where such measures permanently involve a general and indiscriminate monitoring and analysis of communications of all users, they interfere with the right to confidentiality of communications.
- ud_0 5y ago
  > No one removed digital privacy in EU. Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world. The EU currently has tenuous protections that are in danger of being superceded by concerns that are perceived as higher precedence. The article does seem to be doing a reasonable job of highlighting one such process and sets it in context with the bigger issue. > The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members [...] Just because a political opinion has almost no supporters doesn't mean it's wrong. Historically, privacy alarmists got it right more often than not. None of the scenarios outlined in the article seem particularly over the top to me. > Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it. I don't know this person, if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it. But being against data retention seems a reasonably stance in my opinion. > If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each of them the lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop. I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas. But the debacle behind the upload filter / copyright directives has shown to me that those agendas either don't include digital rights (in which case they apparently default to deferring to industry lobbyists) or their agendas are not particularly well aligned with citizens' interests.
cbg0 5y ago
It seems that this is primarily related to CSAM or child sexual abuse material, and this blog post is very clickbaity.
- Zak 5y ago
  Proposals for mass surveillance are almost always related to CSAM or terrorism.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    It's the best way to convince mostly uninformed people to give up their rights to privacy and say okay to surveillance.
noduerme 5y ago
This assault on privacy is premised on a very flimsy concern over CP, which is a problem but is absolutely no reason (just as terrorism isn't) to deprive citizens of their rights. I'm just curious - first of all, what happened to the large amount of child pornography and the industry around it that existed in Denmark throughout the 1970s? The pendulum certainly swings both ways, but it's strange and interesting that the fact that it was legal to produce CP in swathes of Europe has simply been swept under the rug. I'd assume those images and films are now hashed and searched for, but I'd also assume there are hard copies of them laying around in a plurality of Danish households. How do you prosecute possession of something that was legal at the time? Secondly, just to keep using liberal ol' Denmark as an example, since the legal age of consent there is still 15 years old, how do you "harmonize" spying on adults there with spying on minors in the rest of Europe? It's okay to read every 15 year old's text messages and look at their photos because it might be illegal in some other country? What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer? Sexual assault is one thing, but it's worth taking a minute to realize how arbitrary and ridiculous some of these laws are before you start throwing children into jail for texting... let alone stripping away basic civil liberties on the basis of "some people are bad so we can't have nice things."
- randomchars 5y ago
  > What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer? In some countries, you can have sex at 14, but only do sexting at 18. Total mindfuck.
  - A_non_e-moose 5y ago
    Reminds me of the kinder egg VS AR15 ownership thing in the US
    - unstatusthequo 5y ago
      Or drinking age and gambling age vs serving in military…
jsnell 5y ago
Dupe from yesterday (600 points, 300 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115343
- apples_oranges 5y ago
  (imho worth posting and putting in on the FP again..)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marsven_422 5y ago
No guns, no FREEDOM!
c2k 5y ago
Also notice the date on which this law was passed. Everybody in Europe was distracted as "we" were in the mid-finals of UEFA EURO 2020. At least in Germany it is a common pattern to pass controversial laws when big sporting events are happening...
tvirosi 5y ago
I feel like they're just gonna keep pushing for this relentlessly and eventually the public will be too tired to fight back and then they'll win.
jacquesm 5y ago
The contrast between the comments in this thread and the ones about Apple and their image scanner is striking. Just an observation.
12ian34 5y ago
The blog post seems to be written in a slightly sensationalist manner. I tried to find out "what this actually means" but that's also difficult from reading the post itself. The "How does this affect you" section states: > All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically. What, even the stuff that I have end-to-end encrypted? Even this from the first line of the post: > The EU decided to let providers search all private chats, Which "providers" are being referred to here?

295 points by zajio1am 5y ago

This is very nicely presented. Anyone got any links to the other side of this same argument, hopefully as well presented, so us readers can read both to come to our own conclusions?

turbinerneiter 5y ago
The other side does not need to present their case to the populace, they will push and decide against their will anyway.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

libertine 5y ago

After GDPR this simply makes no sense. Basically the EU is saying, companies can't do it... but we can!

bengale 5y ago
I'm not sure it's what I'd want to happen, but it's not really that strange. There are plenty of things we allow the state to do that we wouldn't allow companies to also do.
- libertine 5y ago
  >There are plenty of things we allow the state to do that we wouldn't allow companies to also do. That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part. GDPR was about EU citizens rights and privacy. In fact they uphold public institutions to these standards, and have issued fines.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part. How is that hypocritical. We allow the state to have organized groups with automatic weapons and tanks, and don't allow private individuals or corporations to.
    - libertine 5y ago
      Really? Is that the path you're choosing to go: that everything is justifiable because governments can have nuclear reactors and you can't? But I'll go the extra mile: it's hypocritical because it's a citizen right within EU, it's a double standard, and it's being enforced on public/private organizations. You can't have rights and not have rights at the same time, you either have them or you don't. In EU there are no rights for owning automatic weapons, nuclear reactors, organized armed groups, etc etc.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        My point was that we allow governments to have powers we don't allow private entities to have. The ability to use force, to detain you, to take your land even if you don't want them to, etc. My point is that hypocrisy is a strange argument, because we already have a huge amount of things that the government can do, even if they would otherwise violate property rights/freedom of movement/etc, that private entities cannot.
        libertine 5y ago
        >Definition of hypocrisy >1: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel After years of propaganda, debates and discussion for data protection and privacy rights for EU citizens, and approving such rights by law, you don't think it's hypocrisy that they approve a law that strips citizens from such rights. They believe people have the right to have their data protected and to know what data is being collected, and demand collectors and processors to not hoard data and take only what is necessary. This is literally bulk collecting of chat logs and process them, without people consent. I still don't get your point, there are no rights for citizens to use force, detain others or take land. At least in the EU countries I know. So what rights are being stripped from citizens? It's the same if the USA government said they will abide by the people's rights to own weapons, but decided to ban the sales of all weapons so people can't buy them.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Pretty sure most constitutions forbid the state to put people under surveillance. The EU doesn't have that so it is valid to ask what the EU actually still provide to its citizens. There is in fact a battle right now over who has primacy here. Allegedly it is everyone against Poland, but the details are more nuanced.
emteycz 5y ago
No, you just didn't read full GDPR. It contains countless instances where it explicitly says they can do it, or the companies have to do it for them. Seems like data control was just the first step to data management.
VMG 5y ago
it makes total sense if you realize it is all about control
- viseztrance 5y ago
  Control for whom? Before gdpr the general stance in the industry was we never delete user data, just mark a field saying its deleted in the db and that's that. It's been a total shift. And it's not just that, I've seen first hand that even internal communication about customers are treated with more care as they can legally request all their data.
  - VMG 5y ago
    Control for bureaucrats is the primary goal. If there is some temporary marginal privacy benefit for users, it is a side effect.
djbebs 5y ago
That seems very in line with GDPR and it's carve outs for the EU and member state governments
bobcostas55 5y ago
Think of it as a stationary bandit trying to limit various upstarts that might threaten his position.

iso1210 5y ago

"Over 80% of respondents oppose its application to end-to-end encrypted communications" I suspect that is nothing like the actual feeling of the residents of the EU

cbg0 5y ago
Why would you suspect that? 77.5% of the respondents were EU citizens.
- iso1210 5y ago
  "We asked 100 people who were interested enough to write to their MEP about digital privacy and 80% of them said digital privacy was important" People who are motivated enough to know and comment about these proposals are not a representitive sample of the population. If you were to stand outside Old Trafford and ask people who the best football team in the UK is, you'll get the vast majority saying Manchester United. Do the same thing in London and you'll get people saying it's Arsenal. Aside from both being wrong, you can see the bias. Accredited polling companies adjust results to minimise sample bias, but even then have to be careful to avoid leading questions as shown in this 'documentary': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

pedroma 5y ago

Mild NSFW warning.

yakubin 5y ago
What do you mean?
- pedroma 5y ago
  There's a cartoonized picture of women's breasts on that page.

thoughty 5y ago

Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan horse called CSAM.

xvector 5y ago
Surprise surprise, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were right all along, but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor.
- csomar 5y ago
  > but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor. The term useful idiots come to mind. There is no lack of them.
- aforwardslash 5y ago
  Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
  - xvector 5y ago
    Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance, and many are perfect for anonymity (Monero). Tor is open-source and can be audited for government backdoors.
    - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
      > Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance Mostly Monero. Paying for censored content with Bitcoin can be traced back to you and will get you in jail the same as paying via bank transfer. And Monero is the odd one out here -- most other cryptos don't really help against censorship resistance.
    - 5y ago

AnssiH 5y ago

Note that there isn't yet any concrete proposed legislation for mandatory screening, if there ever will be any - there's only the linked initiative requesting comments (https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12726-Fighting-child-sexual-abuse-detection-removal-and-reporting-of-illegal-content-online_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...). I strongly believe such a legislation would not be able to pass EU parliament if it would require actually breaking E2E encryption.

still_grokking 5y ago
The parliament is not making the laws the EU. The not elected European Commission and the not elected European Council do. That's why we over here call it a democracy-simulation. Breyer is one of the very few trustworthy people in that system. One should listen to his concerns as they're real.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I don't think the EU parliament hat the integrity or competency to evaluate the repercussion of such a law. So no, I don't think the parliament is a trustworthy democratic defense, if they get a say at all that is.

tom7 5y ago

How will they monitor my emails from russian servers to russian servers?

zaik 5y ago

How will this be implemented? Will my XMPP client/gpg binary become illegal?

raverbashing 5y ago

This was already posted some days ago, I though HN had a dupe detector but for some reason it let it through. I have several qualms about this proposal but the crying-wolf manner it is being presented is just ridiculous. The author could have used the opportunity to raise the real risks (especially the false positive risks) instead of pushing for fear-mongering.

bmn__ 5y ago
Can you post a reply with substance instead of vaguely tone-policing?
raxxorrax 5y ago
On principle I would agree. But such laws are so often carried on the back of fear-mongering that I just don't care about making an honest argument about it. It will be ignored anyway, in fact any serious technical advisor was ignored. So why not just reject everything that comes forward here? Spite politics work at least and have an impact. Not only positive, but that isn't in the hands of any honest critic.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

this has been addressed several times here on HN in the past and it's still false. No one removed digital privacy in EU. The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members, Breyer is the only German that was elected and the only one from a western European country. They need to get titles on newspapers, they're good at doing it, but sometimes they go on a hyperbole. Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it. If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each one of them lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop. To add some more details: this is not a private company spying on its users, this is a coalition formed by 25 sovereign countries passing a law that harmonize the different legislation around searching for potentially unlawful digital communications. But the article 5a) specifically states that > Notwithstanding their legitimate objective, these activities constitute an interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private and family life and protection of personal data of all users. Any limitation to the fundamental right to respect for private and family life, including the confidentiality of communications, cannot be justified merely on the ground that certain technologies were previously deployed when the services concerned did not, from a legal perspective, constitute electronic communications services. Such interference is only possible under certain conditions. It needs to be provided for by law, respect the essence of the rights to private and family life and to the protection of personal data and, in compliance with the principle of proportionality, be necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others as enshrined in Article 52 (1) of the Charter. Where such measures permanently involve a general and indiscriminate monitoring and analysis of communications of all users, they interfere with the right to confidentiality of communications.

ud_0 5y ago
> No one removed digital privacy in EU. Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world. The EU currently has tenuous protections that are in danger of being superceded by concerns that are perceived as higher precedence. The article does seem to be doing a reasonable job of highlighting one such process and sets it in context with the bigger issue. > The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members [...] Just because a political opinion has almost no supporters doesn't mean it's wrong. Historically, privacy alarmists got it right more often than not. None of the scenarios outlined in the article seem particularly over the top to me. > Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it. I don't know this person, if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it. But being against data retention seems a reasonably stance in my opinion. > If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each of them the lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop. I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas. But the debacle behind the upload filter / copyright directives has shown to me that those agendas either don't include digital rights (in which case they apparently default to deferring to industry lobbyists) or their agendas are not particularly well aligned with citizens' interests.

cbg0 5y ago

It seems that this is primarily related to CSAM or child sexual abuse material, and this blog post is very clickbaity.

Zak 5y ago
Proposals for mass surveillance are almost always related to CSAM or terrorism.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  It's the best way to convince mostly uninformed people to give up their rights to privacy and say okay to surveillance.

noduerme 5y ago

This assault on privacy is premised on a very flimsy concern over CP, which is a problem but is absolutely no reason (just as terrorism isn't) to deprive citizens of their rights. I'm just curious - first of all, what happened to the large amount of child pornography and the industry around it that existed in Denmark throughout the 1970s? The pendulum certainly swings both ways, but it's strange and interesting that the fact that it was legal to produce CP in swathes of Europe has simply been swept under the rug. I'd assume those images and films are now hashed and searched for, but I'd also assume there are hard copies of them laying around in a plurality of Danish households. How do you prosecute possession of something that was legal at the time? Secondly, just to keep using liberal ol' Denmark as an example, since the legal age of consent there is still 15 years old, how do you "harmonize" spying on adults there with spying on minors in the rest of Europe? It's okay to read every 15 year old's text messages and look at their photos because it might be illegal in some other country? What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer? Sexual assault is one thing, but it's worth taking a minute to realize how arbitrary and ridiculous some of these laws are before you start throwing children into jail for texting... let alone stripping away basic civil liberties on the basis of "some people are bad so we can't have nice things."

randomchars 5y ago
> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer? In some countries, you can have sex at 14, but only do sexting at 18. Total mindfuck.
- A_non_e-moose 5y ago
  Reminds me of the kinder egg VS AR15 ownership thing in the US
  - unstatusthequo 5y ago
    Or drinking age and gambling age vs serving in military…

jsnell 5y ago

Dupe from yesterday (600 points, 300 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115343

apples_oranges 5y ago
(imho worth posting and putting in on the FP again..)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marsven_422 5y ago

No guns, no FREEDOM!

c2k 5y ago

Also notice the date on which this law was passed. Everybody in Europe was distracted as "we" were in the mid-finals of UEFA EURO 2020. At least in Germany it is a common pattern to pass controversial laws when big sporting events are happening...

tvirosi 5y ago

I feel like they're just gonna keep pushing for this relentlessly and eventually the public will be too tired to fight back and then they'll win.

jacquesm 5y ago

The contrast between the comments in this thread and the ones about Apple and their image scanner is striking. Just an observation.

12ian34 5y ago

The blog post seems to be written in a slightly sensationalist manner. I tried to find out "what this actually means" but that's also difficult from reading the post itself. The "How does this affect you" section states: > All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically. What, even the stuff that I have end-to-end encrypted? Even this from the first line of the post: > The EU decided to let providers search all private chats, Which "providers" are being referred to here?