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> we're in a country with better privacy laws Speaking as a European: I think this is a very important topic for us. I don't think Americans and American comp

> we're in a country with better privacy laws Speaking as a European: I think this is a very important topic for us. I don't think Americans and American companies understand how little trust rest of us have for the American government. Working with a company that is not subject to the whims of the American government is a huge privacy win. If a company pitches me a product, they start 1 points ahead if they are based on Switzerland, Netherlands or somewhere similar.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
I always had the suspicion that the (seemingly higher) interest in privacy/FOSS in Europeans is fueled partly by anti-Americanism. In America, even if you don't trust the government, at least it's your government, so I don't feel like that plays as big a role, and any interest in privacy/FOSS (like mine) is untempered by the anxiety of an alien government's interference. :p Regardless, I love how much more Europeans seem to value privacy.
- fritigern 4y ago
  > I always had the suspicion that the (seemingly higher) interest in privacy/FOSS in Europeans is fueled partly by anti-Americanism. Of course it is. After American Wars in the Middle East killed and displaced millions, there is good reason to be wary of Americans and the American government.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > at least it's your government What? Your government is the worst one to go not respecting your rights.
  - fritigern 4y ago
    I worry more about my government compared to the government of a county far away that has no power over me.
judge2020 4y ago
How do the laws play out in practice? If bunny.net started storing user agent and IP address information indefinitely, and someone complained, how likely is it enforcement action is actually enacted on them? It seems such a low-impact privacy violation would be a waste of time for a GDPR/etc agency to focus on compared to things like ad companies selling location data.
- brnt 4y ago
  > How do the laws play out in practice? I think this is important to consider. In practice, it's difficult to have any recourse with an American company. In Europe it's more expected and common that government and consumer orgs take an active role. Both legal culture and culture-culture (?) are just very different, leading people to preferring to steer clear of this expensive and adversarial (compared to EU climes) environment.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    That's the exact scentiment the parent to my comment is suggesting; I'm saying that GDPR agencies probably aren't going to care at all about the type of data sent to a web host when all they're doing is serving fonts for 3p websites.
encoderer 4y ago
Surely you realize that if a modern sophisticated government wants to see your data, they are going to be able to access it, even if it’s stored in the Netherlands? What threat are you protecting yourself against?
- dorgo 4y ago
  > What threat are you protecting yourself against? Against modern sophisticated governments who are busy, lazy, distracted to ask Netherlands to give them my data. I'm not exactly a high priority target. All I have to do is to make it a little harder for them to access my data.
- the_common_man 4y ago
  So, with this logic you would host your data in Russia (just to give a random country) ?
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Why not? Make encrypted backups with `borg` and use `rclone` to distribute them to a number of free cloud storage services -- this is what I and many others do. One of my destinations is Yandex Disk. They all only see an encrypted Borg repo. And in the next few weeks or months I'll make sure they won't even be seeing that. Just a few opaque files several tens of megabytes big each. I wish them luck cracking it, lol. What are they going to do, fly to my fringe country, knock on my door and politely ask me to stop storing encrypted blobs on their servers? No, they will not. First, their TOC does not forbid it and second, they are way too lazy to scope me out of the crowd, and third, they will only start shutting users down if their free plan starts costing them too much. I've been doing this for years and nobody seems to give a frak (Google included). And I am just a regular guy who wants to make sure his code and passion projects (and personal / family photos) are never going to get lost even in a case of disaster. I never in my life did anything to warrant government attention.
    - the_common_man 4y ago
      We are talking about saas, will you put your photos there? Or use yandex email?
itake 4y ago
My understanding of privacy international privacy stuff is if a European gov wants to spy on their own citizens, but the law prevents them, they phone up the USA and have the USA do the spying(hacking?) and get the data from them. European countries do the same for USA gov on US citizens.
- judge2020 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes?wprov=sfti1 In the US at least, any spying is illegal when both parties are within the US and the packets never leave the US.
  - patrec 4y ago
    > In the US at least, any spying is illegal when both parties are within the US And no doubt it must be even more illegal to then perjure yourself in front of congress about not having engaged in such illegal spying, when in fact you have.
  - youngtaff 4y ago
    But if you arrange for the packets to be routed outside the US and then back all sorts of possibilities open up
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    And, who ever got executed for spying domestically? Who ever got a prison sentence in line with the rough prison sentences the US happily gives out for much lesser offenses? Wo ever got so much as a bad performance review? Noone? Why am I not surprised?
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      Illegal things are ok if they involve "national security" or are useful for cold war dick measuring.
      - 4y ago
geraneum 4y ago
People are talking about the possibility of being spied on by governments. I think if you’re targeted by government or intelligence agencies, then even self hosting most likely won’t save you from them. What is important here, and why these laws matter, is how trivial it is to get access to your data, or for companies to sell your data. That’s why I appreciate the European’s effort to have better laws for our privacy. If you really want to be government proof, then you better host everything in a server in a remote secret location out of their reach.
- dorgo 4y ago
  Goverments and intelligence agencies can't target everyone. But they can gather data for future use. So if you don't give them your data you won't be targeted in the future.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    This goes both ways, the lack of the usual amount of data about you is a data point in itself. `SELECT * from citizens where data_points < 50;` And then somebody aims a botnet armed with zero-days in your direction. But yeah, that requires dedicated adversaries that actually notice you -- which is not a given, I'll agree.
    - dorgo 4y ago
      If they have to run a query and pay for the botnet I already won a small battle.
  - geraneum 4y ago
    This is a good point. I would say we shouldn’t make it easy for the governments to access the data as well as private interest or companies. These are not mutually exclusive. EU privacy laws are a step in the right direction. It’s progress. We can build on it.
- fritigern 4y ago
  You are probably right, but that doesn't mean I want to make it easy for them.
fredgrott 4y ago
is that really a mistrust of US gov and firms or a mistrust of the results of the exportation of US Federalisms?
DocTomoe 4y ago
> ... for the American government or any government, especially our own, for that matter. Some just have a better track record at being bound by the rules they give themselves than others.
- fritigern 4y ago
  When it comes to privacy and human rights, America's record is one of the worst in the world.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
pdimitar 4y ago
Have you considered that Switzerland and Netherlands might just, you know, hand other agencies your data without telling you? At this point we're supposed to believe what amounts to feel-good talk. But I keep asking: "How do we know for sure?" I haven't done anything illegal nor do I need to protect some mega-important knowledge but I still dislike giving easy access to my data so I automated parts of my workflow to double-encrypt my most important data and send it to several off-sites plus an own self-hosted server. Sure, they likely know remote Linux network zero-days but the odds of them wanting to target me in particular are minuscule so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
misslibby 4y ago
I'm a European and I have very little trust in European governments. Not much trust in the US government, either.
- blooalien 4y ago
  I'm an American and I have next to zero trust for governments in general. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" and humanity has given too few entirely too much "absolute power". I feel much the same about most of the massive corporate entities as well.
  - jen20 4y ago
    The difference is Europe is better at restricting corporate overreach than the US is, regardless of how similar their governments have become. That said, I'd take almost any European government over any US government of my entire lifetime, especially when it comes to actually enacting privacy legislation. I couldn't care less about web fonts though. I'm not downloading them from Google or "bunny.net" or anywhere else. My computer has some of the nicest-looking fonts around as system defaults, and websites can either work with that or get put into reader mode.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Hmm. Well over the past century, European governments have collectively murdered a lot more people than any of the North American governments have.
    - junofan 4y ago
      Here are the GDPR fines: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ Enacting legislation is one thing. Somalia is excellent at enacting gun control legislation.
      - jen20 4y ago
        One must enact legislation before one can enforce it.
dundarious 4y ago
I’m surprised you emphasized government wrt. privacy here. Sure, despite the fact that the US government institutions have more mechanisms for oversight and transparency after 20 or 40 years, etc., they are certainly the most profligate in their use of surveillance and hacking, etc., and US three letter agencies are the most adept at completely side-stepping those publicized limitations — so it’s not like the government isn’t an issue, and the US government most of all. But when it comes to surveillance on this quotidian level, I think private/corporate surveillance it’s far more relevant and problematic. In that regard, I’d slightly prefer a European country with good privacy laws like those you listed, because (probably) Bunny is not itself at the level of a panopticon such as Google, and the likelihood it has or would avail of avenues for resale to panopticon capable data brokers is less than it would be for US companies. But even there, it does seem like a quite incremental improvement. The door is still wedged open, but now probably less wide, and probably with a stronger doorstop. It would be nice to not leave the door open at all.
- fritigern 4y ago
  I am not worried too much about corporate surveillance. I can always shop somewhere else. I can't change my government. I use DDG because I don't like Google. I can't do the same with my government.
  - dundarious 4y ago
    Fair enough, and in a sense I don't even really disagree, but my point is essentially that self-hosting eliminates the class of problems almost entirely, meaning there would be no need to rely on this kind of 2nd order competition at all.
troynt 4y ago
Would you trust a Switzerland based company that uses GCP or AWS?
kube-system 4y ago
Unless you're under a totalitarian government, spies aren't really interested in most people's data. Data brokers, on the other hand, are willing to sell anything they can profit from.
- eivarv 4y ago
  Yet bulk data collection (in effect "mass surveillance") happens, and poses a risk in and of itself to data subjects.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    You can't use the internet without risk. All you can do is measure relative risks and decide which are acceptable. Means, motive, and opportunity matter. Someone who is missing the motive portion is less of a concern than someone who has all three.
    - fritigern 4y ago
      No one expects zero risk, it's about reducing risk. I choose to avoid American companies in favour of non-American competitors because the American government is hostile to privacy and is a warmonger.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        90%+ of governments are more hostile to privacy than the US. It might make sense to prefer countries with GDPR, but the vast majority of "non-American countries" have even worse protections for your data. > and is a warmonger. This is flamebait unrelated to data privacy risk. If you don't want to use American companies because you have an political opposition to supporting US companies, that's also a valid opinion. You don't have to twist it into a data privacy argument.
        6510 4y ago
        I think he is referring to the drone strikes based on meta data.
throwaway1777 4y ago
Between the joke of an energy policy in Germany this year and Douglas Murray’s books I have no confidence in European governments either. I used to feel Europe’s system was more competent but the illusion has been shattered.
- 0des 4y ago
  Wait what the heck are they doing to books?
- zeven7 4y ago
  To add to that now every other website has an annoying and useless cookie dialog I have to dismiss, as if that's forward progress in privacy protection.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    That is the website owners implementing the rules in the worst way possible, either through incompetence or through deliberately trying to annoy (or fool) you into accepting everything. Be angry at the sites, not the legislation.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      Can I be angry at both? Legislation is only required to regulate bad behavior by some set of entities. As such, legislation should be written assuming that those entities will exploit any loopholes. Malicious compliance is exactly what the EU should have expected and planned for.
      - 6510 4y ago
        They are now forced to tell you what they are doing. That it makes you angry is a design goal.
        dspillett 4y ago
        Well, not quite. They are forced to stop hiding what they were doing. They could make everything opt-in, and it could be simple single checkbox or button, they are not forced to do any of what they are currently doing. And if it makes people angry at the legislation, the lying back-stabbing “your privacy matters to us” arseholes in marketing are successfully making that goal backfire.
pydry 4y ago
>If a company pitches me a product, they start 1 points ahead if they are based on Switzerland Crypto AG was based out of switzerland.
- fritigern 4y ago
  It was owned by American Government.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Secretly, for decades. You don't know who secretly owns any companies in Switzerland today. Your favorite Swiss VPN could be owned by Equifax or Acxiom for all you know.
yieldcrv 4y ago
The internet culture's understanding of Swiss privacy laws are laughable at best. Switzerland has existing laws to any and everything for records. You are trusting them just as much as a server in any other country. Saying "Switzerland" is all marketing for privacy enthusiasts who aren't going to do anything on their own.
BurningFrog 4y ago
The US government has some restrictions of spying on inside the country. Much less so abroad. So you're safer from the USG inside the US. Then again, they don't have a great track record of following those restrictions, so I doubt it really matters.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jokethrowaway 4y ago
Any government sending any request to any company is very likely to get a compliant answer if they want to operate in that market. You can only trust services like signal which make it impossible for the operators to access your data GDPR is mainly against corporations making money out of knowing who you are across the web, it won't save you from a government actor
- fritigern 4y ago
  Signal Foundation is based in the US. It takes only 1 national security letter to compromise them.
ByteJockey 4y ago
> I don't think Americans and American companies understand how little trust rest of us have for the American government. Have you... have you seen our politics? What makes you think that we think other people trust our government? We don't trust our government. Hell, it's trusted so little that one of our large political parties is basically entirely devoted to making sure that the government can't get anything done.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  ... and, at the same time, to radically increasing government spending literally everywhere except where there might be a possibility of benefit for an individual who needs help (just because said individual could possibly be ("a") black).
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  That political party's actions are about weakening the federal government so as to make it easier for large corporations to behave abusively, not because of trust. States have less resources, and can be played against each other. The public-facing excuse for Joe Q Public is "they can't be trusted!", "less taxes on your hard-earned money" (when corporate share of taxes has plunged from the 50-50 split it used to be, increasing individual taxes), "the government is not efficient" (usually because of lots of onerous regulations and reporting and oversight that, ahem, a certain political party insisted on to fight "abuse")
  - ByteJockey 4y ago
    > That political party's actions are about weakening the federal government so as to make it easier for large corporations to behave abusively, not because of trust. Can you think of a reason people would do that if they didn't trust those corporations more than the federal government?
    - tremon 4y ago
      Sure: because the corporations pay more than the federal government.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

I always had the suspicion that the (seemingly higher) interest in privacy/FOSS in Europeans is fueled partly by anti-Americanism. In America, even if you don't trust the government, at least it's your government, so I don't feel like that plays as big a role, and any interest in privacy/FOSS (like mine) is untempered by the anxiety of an alien government's interference. :p Regardless, I love how much more Europeans seem to value privacy.

fritigern 4y ago
> I always had the suspicion that the (seemingly higher) interest in privacy/FOSS in Europeans is fueled partly by anti-Americanism. Of course it is. After American Wars in the Middle East killed and displaced millions, there is good reason to be wary of Americans and the American government.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
marcosdumay 4y ago
> at least it's your government What? Your government is the worst one to go not respecting your rights.
- fritigern 4y ago
  I worry more about my government compared to the government of a county far away that has no power over me.

judge2020 4y ago

How do the laws play out in practice? If bunny.net started storing user agent and IP address information indefinitely, and someone complained, how likely is it enforcement action is actually enacted on them? It seems such a low-impact privacy violation would be a waste of time for a GDPR/etc agency to focus on compared to things like ad companies selling location data.

brnt 4y ago
> How do the laws play out in practice? I think this is important to consider. In practice, it's difficult to have any recourse with an American company. In Europe it's more expected and common that government and consumer orgs take an active role. Both legal culture and culture-culture (?) are just very different, leading people to preferring to steer clear of this expensive and adversarial (compared to EU climes) environment.
- judge2020 4y ago
  That's the exact scentiment the parent to my comment is suggesting; I'm saying that GDPR agencies probably aren't going to care at all about the type of data sent to a web host when all they're doing is serving fonts for 3p websites.

encoderer 4y ago

Surely you realize that if a modern sophisticated government wants to see your data, they are going to be able to access it, even if it’s stored in the Netherlands? What threat are you protecting yourself against?

dorgo 4y ago
> What threat are you protecting yourself against? Against modern sophisticated governments who are busy, lazy, distracted to ask Netherlands to give them my data. I'm not exactly a high priority target. All I have to do is to make it a little harder for them to access my data.
the_common_man 4y ago
So, with this logic you would host your data in Russia (just to give a random country) ?
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Why not? Make encrypted backups with `borg` and use `rclone` to distribute them to a number of free cloud storage services -- this is what I and many others do. One of my destinations is Yandex Disk. They all only see an encrypted Borg repo. And in the next few weeks or months I'll make sure they won't even be seeing that. Just a few opaque files several tens of megabytes big each. I wish them luck cracking it, lol. What are they going to do, fly to my fringe country, knock on my door and politely ask me to stop storing encrypted blobs on their servers? No, they will not. First, their TOC does not forbid it and second, they are way too lazy to scope me out of the crowd, and third, they will only start shutting users down if their free plan starts costing them too much. I've been doing this for years and nobody seems to give a frak (Google included). And I am just a regular guy who wants to make sure his code and passion projects (and personal / family photos) are never going to get lost even in a case of disaster. I never in my life did anything to warrant government attention.
  - the_common_man 4y ago
    We are talking about saas, will you put your photos there? Or use yandex email?

itake 4y ago

My understanding of privacy international privacy stuff is if a European gov wants to spy on their own citizens, but the law prevents them, they phone up the USA and have the USA do the spying(hacking?) and get the data from them. European countries do the same for USA gov on US citizens.

judge2020 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes?wprov=sfti1 In the US at least, any spying is illegal when both parties are within the US and the packets never leave the US.
- patrec 4y ago
  > In the US at least, any spying is illegal when both parties are within the US And no doubt it must be even more illegal to then perjure yourself in front of congress about not having engaged in such illegal spying, when in fact you have.
- youngtaff 4y ago
  But if you arrange for the packets to be routed outside the US and then back all sorts of possibilities open up
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  And, who ever got executed for spying domestically? Who ever got a prison sentence in line with the rough prison sentences the US happily gives out for much lesser offenses? Wo ever got so much as a bad performance review? Noone? Why am I not surprised?
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Illegal things are ok if they involve "national security" or are useful for cold war dick measuring.
    - 4y ago

geraneum 4y ago

People are talking about the possibility of being spied on by governments. I think if you’re targeted by government or intelligence agencies, then even self hosting most likely won’t save you from them. What is important here, and why these laws matter, is how trivial it is to get access to your data, or for companies to sell your data. That’s why I appreciate the European’s effort to have better laws for our privacy. If you really want to be government proof, then you better host everything in a server in a remote secret location out of their reach.

dorgo 4y ago
Goverments and intelligence agencies can't target everyone. But they can gather data for future use. So if you don't give them your data you won't be targeted in the future.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  This goes both ways, the lack of the usual amount of data about you is a data point in itself. `SELECT * from citizens where data_points < 50;` And then somebody aims a botnet armed with zero-days in your direction. But yeah, that requires dedicated adversaries that actually notice you -- which is not a given, I'll agree.
  - dorgo 4y ago
    If they have to run a query and pay for the botnet I already won a small battle.
- geraneum 4y ago
  This is a good point. I would say we shouldn’t make it easy for the governments to access the data as well as private interest or companies. These are not mutually exclusive. EU privacy laws are a step in the right direction. It’s progress. We can build on it.
fritigern 4y ago
You are probably right, but that doesn't mean I want to make it easy for them.

fredgrott 4y ago

is that really a mistrust of US gov and firms or a mistrust of the results of the exportation of US Federalisms?

DocTomoe 4y ago

> ... for the American government or any government, especially our own, for that matter. Some just have a better track record at being bound by the rules they give themselves than others.

fritigern 4y ago
When it comes to privacy and human rights, America's record is one of the worst in the world.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

pdimitar 4y ago

Have you considered that Switzerland and Netherlands might just, you know, hand other agencies your data without telling you? At this point we're supposed to believe what amounts to feel-good talk. But I keep asking: "How do we know for sure?" I haven't done anything illegal nor do I need to protect some mega-important knowledge but I still dislike giving easy access to my data so I automated parts of my workflow to double-encrypt my most important data and send it to several off-sites plus an own self-hosted server. Sure, they likely know remote Linux network zero-days but the odds of them wanting to target me in particular are minuscule so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

misslibby 4y ago

I'm a European and I have very little trust in European governments. Not much trust in the US government, either.

blooalien 4y ago
I'm an American and I have next to zero trust for governments in general. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" and humanity has given too few entirely too much "absolute power". I feel much the same about most of the massive corporate entities as well.
- jen20 4y ago
  The difference is Europe is better at restricting corporate overreach than the US is, regardless of how similar their governments have become. That said, I'd take almost any European government over any US government of my entire lifetime, especially when it comes to actually enacting privacy legislation. I couldn't care less about web fonts though. I'm not downloading them from Google or "bunny.net" or anywhere else. My computer has some of the nicest-looking fonts around as system defaults, and websites can either work with that or get put into reader mode.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Hmm. Well over the past century, European governments have collectively murdered a lot more people than any of the North American governments have.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Here are the GDPR fines: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ Enacting legislation is one thing. Somalia is excellent at enacting gun control legislation.
    - jen20 4y ago
      One must enact legislation before one can enforce it.

dundarious 4y ago

I’m surprised you emphasized government wrt. privacy here. Sure, despite the fact that the US government institutions have more mechanisms for oversight and transparency after 20 or 40 years, etc., they are certainly the most profligate in their use of surveillance and hacking, etc., and US three letter agencies are the most adept at completely side-stepping those publicized limitations — so it’s not like the government isn’t an issue, and the US government most of all. But when it comes to surveillance on this quotidian level, I think private/corporate surveillance it’s far more relevant and problematic. In that regard, I’d slightly prefer a European country with good privacy laws like those you listed, because (probably) Bunny is not itself at the level of a panopticon such as Google, and the likelihood it has or would avail of avenues for resale to panopticon capable data brokers is less than it would be for US companies. But even there, it does seem like a quite incremental improvement. The door is still wedged open, but now probably less wide, and probably with a stronger doorstop. It would be nice to not leave the door open at all.

fritigern 4y ago
I am not worried too much about corporate surveillance. I can always shop somewhere else. I can't change my government. I use DDG because I don't like Google. I can't do the same with my government.
- dundarious 4y ago
  Fair enough, and in a sense I don't even really disagree, but my point is essentially that self-hosting eliminates the class of problems almost entirely, meaning there would be no need to rely on this kind of 2nd order competition at all.

troynt 4y ago

Would you trust a Switzerland based company that uses GCP or AWS?

kube-system 4y ago

Unless you're under a totalitarian government, spies aren't really interested in most people's data. Data brokers, on the other hand, are willing to sell anything they can profit from.

eivarv 4y ago
Yet bulk data collection (in effect "mass surveillance") happens, and poses a risk in and of itself to data subjects.
- kube-system 4y ago
  You can't use the internet without risk. All you can do is measure relative risks and decide which are acceptable. Means, motive, and opportunity matter. Someone who is missing the motive portion is less of a concern than someone who has all three.
  - fritigern 4y ago
    No one expects zero risk, it's about reducing risk. I choose to avoid American companies in favour of non-American competitors because the American government is hostile to privacy and is a warmonger.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      90%+ of governments are more hostile to privacy than the US. It might make sense to prefer countries with GDPR, but the vast majority of "non-American countries" have even worse protections for your data. > and is a warmonger. This is flamebait unrelated to data privacy risk. If you don't want to use American companies because you have an political opposition to supporting US companies, that's also a valid opinion. You don't have to twist it into a data privacy argument.
      - 6510 4y ago
        I think he is referring to the drone strikes based on meta data.

throwaway1777 4y ago

Between the joke of an energy policy in Germany this year and Douglas Murray’s books I have no confidence in European governments either. I used to feel Europe’s system was more competent but the illusion has been shattered.

0des 4y ago
Wait what the heck are they doing to books?
zeven7 4y ago
To add to that now every other website has an annoying and useless cookie dialog I have to dismiss, as if that's forward progress in privacy protection.
- dspillett 4y ago
  That is the website owners implementing the rules in the worst way possible, either through incompetence or through deliberately trying to annoy (or fool) you into accepting everything. Be angry at the sites, not the legislation.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Can I be angry at both? Legislation is only required to regulate bad behavior by some set of entities. As such, legislation should be written assuming that those entities will exploit any loopholes. Malicious compliance is exactly what the EU should have expected and planned for.
    - 6510 4y ago
      They are now forced to tell you what they are doing. That it makes you angry is a design goal.
      - dspillett 4y ago
        Well, not quite. They are forced to stop hiding what they were doing. They could make everything opt-in, and it could be simple single checkbox or button, they are not forced to do any of what they are currently doing. And if it makes people angry at the legislation, the lying back-stabbing “your privacy matters to us” arseholes in marketing are successfully making that goal backfire.

pydry 4y ago

>If a company pitches me a product, they start 1 points ahead if they are based on Switzerland Crypto AG was based out of switzerland.

fritigern 4y ago
It was owned by American Government.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Secretly, for decades. You don't know who secretly owns any companies in Switzerland today. Your favorite Swiss VPN could be owned by Equifax or Acxiom for all you know.

yieldcrv 4y ago

The internet culture's understanding of Swiss privacy laws are laughable at best. Switzerland has existing laws to any and everything for records. You are trusting them just as much as a server in any other country. Saying "Switzerland" is all marketing for privacy enthusiasts who aren't going to do anything on their own.

BurningFrog 4y ago

The US government has some restrictions of spying on inside the country. Much less so abroad. So you're safer from the USG inside the US. Then again, they don't have a great track record of following those restrictions, so I doubt it really matters.

deleted 4y ago

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jokethrowaway 4y ago

Any government sending any request to any company is very likely to get a compliant answer if they want to operate in that market. You can only trust services like signal which make it impossible for the operators to access your data GDPR is mainly against corporations making money out of knowing who you are across the web, it won't save you from a government actor

fritigern 4y ago
Signal Foundation is based in the US. It takes only 1 national security letter to compromise them.

ByteJockey 4y ago

> I don't think Americans and American companies understand how little trust rest of us have for the American government. Have you... have you seen our politics? What makes you think that we think other people trust our government? We don't trust our government. Hell, it's trusted so little that one of our large political parties is basically entirely devoted to making sure that the government can't get anything done.

ncmncm 4y ago
... and, at the same time, to radically increasing government spending literally everywhere except where there might be a possibility of benefit for an individual who needs help (just because said individual could possibly be ("a") black).
KennyBlanken 4y ago
That political party's actions are about weakening the federal government so as to make it easier for large corporations to behave abusively, not because of trust. States have less resources, and can be played against each other. The public-facing excuse for Joe Q Public is "they can't be trusted!", "less taxes on your hard-earned money" (when corporate share of taxes has plunged from the 50-50 split it used to be, increasing individual taxes), "the government is not efficient" (usually because of lots of onerous regulations and reporting and oversight that, ahem, a certain political party insisted on to fight "abuse")
- ByteJockey 4y ago
  > That political party's actions are about weakening the federal government so as to make it easier for large corporations to behave abusively, not because of trust. Can you think of a reason people would do that if they didn't trust those corporations more than the federal government?
  - tremon 4y ago
    Sure: because the corporations pay more than the federal government.

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