4 ms·

US expected to publish Privacy Shield executive order next week

61 points by bluish29 4y ago

M2Ys4U 4y ago
An Executive Order is not good enough, frankly. The US needs real legislative change in order to be considered adequate under EU human rights law.
angrycontrarian 4y ago
Will this cancel out the other executive order, mandating that the government track my online purchases?
- haswell 4y ago
  Which executive order is this?
  - angrycontrarian 4y ago
    Looks like all financial transactions in general, not necessarily online ones: https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2021/10/09/what-you-need-know-biden-plan-track-600-bank-accounts/6052734001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2021/10/09/wh...
    - haswell 4y ago
      > The idea is to require banks, credit unions and other providers of financial services to track and submit information to the IRS about the total inflows and outflows of every account > The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals. This seems quite different than "tracking purchases", online or not. As far as I can tell, they're looking to identify movement of money between accounts that would indicate behavior meant to skirt taxes. I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize this as "tracking purchases". Did this ever actually go into effect? Looks like this was all just a proposal at the time the article was written.
      - Test0129 4y ago
        Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point > Reports submitted by banks to the IRS would break down the numbers to include physical-cash transactions per account, any transactions with a foreign account and transactions between accounts held by the same owner. The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals. This implies tracking of purchases. In particular, a half-awake person will use cash to make transactions they don't want someone to know about. It doesn't take much digging to correlate a cash transaction to something if you know a few more details. At any rate: > I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize this as "tracking purchases". It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to distract you from yet another incursion into our right to privacy.
        shuntress 4y ago
        What do you mean by a "half-awake person"? Also, cash purchases do not interact in any way with your bank account so I still do not see how this is tracking purchases.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        It doesn't "imply" tracking transactions rather specifically says they aren't going to track transactions. From your own quote: > The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals. The banks will just have to provide a total account breakdown, e.g.: John Doe 2022 - Account 1 Report: $10,000 to foreign banks, $6,000 received in cash, $3,000 sent to John Doe Account 2.
        haswell 4y ago
        > Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point How so? The quote you just pasted includes what I already quoted - specifically that the IRS does not receive details on individual transactions. Here's another article that explores this and the common misrepresentation of the proposal as well [0]. Your bank already tracks your purchases. They must do so to know how much money you have now, and how much you'll have after you make a purchase. That would not change. They also cannot see what you do with your cash - that will also not change. The thing that seems new (and again, still potentially concerning, but also potentially reasonable), is that gross totals will be shared. > It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to distract you from yet another incursion into our right to privacy. Given two scenarios, one in which a full list of your individual transactions are sent to the IRS, and one in which aggregate inflow/outflow data is provided to the IRS, are you really arguing that these are the same, or that distinguishing between them is splitting hairs? Another framing would be that this is looking for an accurate representation of what's actually going on. How would you distinguish some hypothetical future policy that involves actually tracking/sending individual purchases from this one that does not do such a thing? But this all feels like a conversation of dubious value since we're discussing an article that talks about a proposal that hadn't yet been finalized at the time of writing. I'm not saying there aren't things to ask questions about there, but I am saying that getting the details right matters. - [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/29/fact-check-post-treasury-tax-proposal-partly-false/8411799002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/29/fac...
EnKopVand 4y ago
I spent a decade working with digitalisation in the public sector in Denmark and I doubt this will change a thing considering a executive order is too risky to rely on. I'm a little torn on the issue because I value privacy, but currently we have a nice scandal going here in my country, which is essentially the former top intelligence boss of the military secret police, or whatever you'd call it in English, being accused of leaking state secrets. What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way. While the bureaucrats and lawyers discuss this, both the public and private sector suffers the financial consequences. We recently had a smaller scandal, where a town was told they couldn't use their chromebooks, or their google education setup, for this years schooling. Essentially making it impossible for that city to teach, because so much of their setup relied on google education and they only had a month to find an alternative. You can argue privacy over this, but it's sort of weird that one city, out of 30+ cities, were banned from using these tools while the others weren't, and that they were banned from it because they fucked up their documentation. I'm not going to defend google, but really, in this case we're hurting the education of thousands of children over something silly. Because the alternative to google education isn't going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn't exist, it's going to be Microsoft and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world issue. There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in a worse alternative? I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it's done in secret. But an executive order isn't really going to help us, because who knows what the next American government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way. Yeah :/ Unless I hear otherwise, I'm assuming this order has little to offer individuals and is instead a big business & government treaty. Governments (including our European ones) keeps their mass surveillance and American mega-corporations get the business contracts, all covered in PR of increased individual privacy. Since it's an executive order, it also wouldn't surprise me if there's a hidden payload relating to increased US surveillance due to the war. I may sound cynical but every leak about the intelligence apparatus has proven even me naive.

61 points by bluish29 4y ago

An Executive Order is not good enough, frankly. The US needs real legislative change in order to be considered adequate under EU human rights law.

angrycontrarian 4y ago

Will this cancel out the other executive order, mandating that the government track my online purchases?

haswell 4y ago
Which executive order is this?
- angrycontrarian 4y ago
  Looks like all financial transactions in general, not necessarily online ones: https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2021/10/09/what-you-need-know-biden-plan-track-600-bank-accounts/6052734001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2021/10/09/wh...
  - haswell 4y ago
    > The idea is to require banks, credit unions and other providers of financial services to track and submit information to the IRS about the total inflows and outflows of every account > The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals. This seems quite different than "tracking purchases", online or not. As far as I can tell, they're looking to identify movement of money between accounts that would indicate behavior meant to skirt taxes. I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize this as "tracking purchases". Did this ever actually go into effect? Looks like this was all just a proposal at the time the article was written.
    - Test0129 4y ago
      Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point > Reports submitted by banks to the IRS would break down the numbers to include physical-cash transactions per account, any transactions with a foreign account and transactions between accounts held by the same owner. The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals. This implies tracking of purchases. In particular, a half-awake person will use cash to make transactions they don't want someone to know about. It doesn't take much digging to correlate a cash transaction to something if you know a few more details. At any rate: > I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize this as "tracking purchases". It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to distract you from yet another incursion into our right to privacy.
      - shuntress 4y ago
        What do you mean by a "half-awake person"? Also, cash purchases do not interact in any way with your bank account so I still do not see how this is tracking purchases.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        It doesn't "imply" tracking transactions rather specifically says they aren't going to track transactions. From your own quote: > The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals. The banks will just have to provide a total account breakdown, e.g.: John Doe 2022 - Account 1 Report: $10,000 to foreign banks, $6,000 received in cash, $3,000 sent to John Doe Account 2.
      - haswell 4y ago
        > Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point How so? The quote you just pasted includes what I already quoted - specifically that the IRS does not receive details on individual transactions. Here's another article that explores this and the common misrepresentation of the proposal as well [0]. Your bank already tracks your purchases. They must do so to know how much money you have now, and how much you'll have after you make a purchase. That would not change. They also cannot see what you do with your cash - that will also not change. The thing that seems new (and again, still potentially concerning, but also potentially reasonable), is that gross totals will be shared. > It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to distract you from yet another incursion into our right to privacy. Given two scenarios, one in which a full list of your individual transactions are sent to the IRS, and one in which aggregate inflow/outflow data is provided to the IRS, are you really arguing that these are the same, or that distinguishing between them is splitting hairs? Another framing would be that this is looking for an accurate representation of what's actually going on. How would you distinguish some hypothetical future policy that involves actually tracking/sending individual purchases from this one that does not do such a thing? But this all feels like a conversation of dubious value since we're discussing an article that talks about a proposal that hadn't yet been finalized at the time of writing. I'm not saying there aren't things to ask questions about there, but I am saying that getting the details right matters. - [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/29/fact-check-post-treasury-tax-proposal-partly-false/8411799002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/29/fac...

EnKopVand 4y ago

I spent a decade working with digitalisation in the public sector in Denmark and I doubt this will change a thing considering a executive order is too risky to rely on. I'm a little torn on the issue because I value privacy, but currently we have a nice scandal going here in my country, which is essentially the former top intelligence boss of the military secret police, or whatever you'd call it in English, being accused of leaking state secrets. What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way. While the bureaucrats and lawyers discuss this, both the public and private sector suffers the financial consequences. We recently had a smaller scandal, where a town was told they couldn't use their chromebooks, or their google education setup, for this years schooling. Essentially making it impossible for that city to teach, because so much of their setup relied on google education and they only had a month to find an alternative. You can argue privacy over this, but it's sort of weird that one city, out of 30+ cities, were banned from using these tools while the others weren't, and that they were banned from it because they fucked up their documentation. I'm not going to defend google, but really, in this case we're hurting the education of thousands of children over something silly. Because the alternative to google education isn't going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn't exist, it's going to be Microsoft and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world issue. There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in a worse alternative? I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it's done in secret. But an executive order isn't really going to help us, because who knows what the next American government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.

klabb3 4y ago
> What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way. Yeah :/ Unless I hear otherwise, I'm assuming this order has little to offer individuals and is instead a big business & government treaty. Governments (including our European ones) keeps their mass surveillance and American mega-corporations get the business contracts, all covered in PR of increased individual privacy. Since it's an executive order, it also wouldn't surprise me if there's a hidden payload relating to increased US surveillance due to the war. I may sound cynical but every leak about the intelligence apparatus has proven even me naive.