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American tech companies have been pushing the needle on privacy ever since Google. Then Facebook. They've gradually normalised that privacy does not exist, all
by ricardo81 10mo ago
American tech companies have been pushing the needle on privacy ever since Google. Then Facebook. They've gradually normalised that privacy does not exist, all for their own capital gain.
There are European alternatives but they need support.
IMHO it requires conscious choices by European citizens to choose more carefully which online services they dedicate their time and money to. Or expect unintended consequences.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoIMO European countries, especially France/Germany are more of “I don’t allow other countries to take privacy data of EU citizens but I want backdoor accesses/whatever I need”, which is fine though.
- CalRobert 10mo agoEurope’s (really Ireland’s) lacklustre enforcement of GDPR means it has hurt European companies (which at least try to comply) without even meaningfully improving privacy. Subject access requests are fun at least.
- mnky9800n 10mo agoYes gdpr could be good. But instead it’s a cookies warning.
- moi2388 10mo agoNo, those two are completely separate laws
- qwertox 10mo agoCookie warnings are a sign of companies not willing to accept that they cannot just collect data on you and monetize it. How does that make the EU regulation something bad? The bad thing is that the companies are willing to bombard us with the worst possible cookie banners, in order to monetize our visits. Maybe the next EU regulation should be to prohibit those banners and allow companies to add a small toggle somewhere on their site so we can toggle it to allow them to set 3rd-party cookies.
- petcat 10mo ago> The bad thing is that the companies are willing to bombard us with the worst possible cookie banners, in order to monetize our visits. The EU's own government websites [1] are littered with the same cookie banners. They want the visitor data just as bad as everyone else. > Maybe the next EU regulation We don't need anymore EU regulations seeing how bad and thoughtless they already are. [1] https://european-union.europa.eu/ https://european-union.europa.eu/
- eps 10mo ago> _We_ don't need anymore EU regulations seeing how bad and thoughtless ... Try and speak for yourself. No need to speak on everyone's behalf, this is disingenuous.
- qwertox 10mo ago-> [Accept all cookies] [Accept only essential cookies] at the bottom of the page. Sure, I don't understand why they don't remove it if they know that an average-iq'd person would accept only essential cookies, but that cookie banner belongs to the top 5% of friendly cookie banners. I was talking about those you find on the typical website, usually news sites, who make them as annoying as possible.
- CalRobert 10mo agoIt’s bad because they’re not enforcing it. Have the law and enforce it or don’t have the law.
- jwr 10mo agoGDPR has nothing to do with cookies, in spite of the commonly spread false narrative.
- juliangmp 10mo agoI never understood the crying about the cookie banners They're not the problem, they never have been. It's the fact that so many parts of the modern internet rely on selling user data to make a profit, not the regulation that they now have to do the outrageous thing and (gasp) ask for consent first.
- immibis 10mo agoThe problem with GDPR and cookie banners is that GDPR allows the cookie banners to be worded so indirectly. "To improve our service we share collected information with 5723 partners..." If the law would force them to say "Do you want Larry Ellison to get richer by looking through your webcam? [Yes] [No]" it would be a good law.
- MiddleEndian 10mo agoIdeally it would just be like the Do Not Track flag, with one flag for each category of opt-out tracking, but actually enforced (even if on by default) so no popups would be needed at all.
- CalRobert 10mo agoIt doesn’t. That’s violating gdpr. But you can break gdpr without consequences.
- ascorbic 10mo agoCookie warnings are from the ePrivacy directive.
- CalRobert 10mo agoCookie warnings predate gdpr actually. (Random discussion from 16 years ago - https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/25/cookie_law/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/25/cookie_law/) The funny thing is 99% of cookie dialogs are illegal anyway (it should be opt in, not opt out)
- hexbin010 10mo agoI wonder why Ireland has such lackluster enforcement of GDPR... Oh, aren't many of big tech's EU HQs in Ireland?
- omnimus 10mo agoIt's not only about GDPR. It's even more about profit shifting and low taxation of big tech. Ireland has been selling out EU on digital front for over a decade.
- af78 10mo agoTaxation is only part of the picture. Quoting from https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/: In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech... Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.
- hexbin010 10mo agoWow he did NOT mince his words. I've not seen the situation described like that ever. Thanks for sharing
- snickerbockers 10mo agoHow enforceable is GDPR against foreigners anyways? FANGs are motivated to comply because any sufficiently large corporation will inevitably have assets that the EU can freeze, but otherwise it's just a limp-dick attempt at exerting sovereignty well beyond their borders which will get laughed out of any court.
- bacr 10mo agoGDPR isn’t enforceable against foreign companies. It is enforceable against subsidiaries registered within the EU. Living in Germany means you are doing business with Google GmbH (or likely, the Irish subsidiary). Don’t want to comply with German law? Then Google GmbH must exit the German market.
- CalRobert 10mo agoI’m an eu citizen in Europe concerned with data practices of European entities so I don’t care about how it might be limited outside the EU.
- spwa4 10mo agoWhat EU governments are doing goes a lot further than mere lackluster gpdr and other privacy law enforcement. They are forcing citizens to give their private information to US firms, nothing less. > IMHO it requires conscious choices by European citizens to choose more carefully which online services they dedicate their time and money to. Or expect unintended consequences. You mean, European citizens "need to" expect to, and pay for, basic internet services like search, mail, ... and, let's be honest, pay for worse services than are available free. Imho proton is about the best available, it's just mail and office, and it's 5 euros per month for just mail and basic office, essentially Google's free tier. Obviously, this will never happen. So either the government makes such services, and makes them well enough to seriously compete or implements a "great firewall of Europe" Chinese/Russian style and forces the change. Instead, governments are introducing dependency after dependency on FANG companies. Is there any place left in the EU where you can even do your taxes without identifying through Google/Android or Apple/IOS on Chinese made hardware? Any at all? How about all of Europe? There was a row in the Netherlands about efforts to force homeless people to pay for cell phones ... and the government is refusing to back down. It's just incredible. Even if the EU kicked out the FANGs with a "great firewall of EU", to force people to pay, it would decimate the gig economy and show that EU unemployment, especially among young people, is really double or perhaps even more the figure it appears to be. Plus I don't think it would work. Too many people would choose to simply stop interacting with the government under such a situation. And while the government can deal with 1 or 1000 people not doing their taxes, they cannot hope to deal with 10% not doing their taxes. The only solution is that all European governments force themselves to ONLY work through "sovereign" channels not dependent on American companies. Right now they are all doing the opposite, and in fact not just encouraging EU citizens to give their information to FANGs, but actively forcing them to do so. And you're right. This can only end in disaster. But it's slightly cheaper now. And the disaster is tomorrow. Didn't Charlie Munger say "you young people ... tomorrow's politicians will make you wish Trump had eternal life"? If it's not Trump, sooner or later someone will blow up relations with the EU, and even within the EU, on either side.
- whimsicalism 10mo agowow, you all are having some crazy nationalistic thing going on it seems. best of luck
- Workaccount2 10mo ago>which online services they dedicate their time and money to. Ain't nobody dedicating their money to anything. That's exactly why these enormous tech giants are privacy nightmares. How many people complaining about Google have used their services extensively for decades now, and never have once given a cent to Google? Probably over 90%. People were offended when Google launched YouTube Premium because it encroached on their right to "free" everything from Google. Even today people still chain themselves to the hill of "I will never give youtube a penny", despite them probably using a couple percentage points of their entire waking life on google products. Europe is in a tough, if not impossible spot, of having (relatively) heavy privacy protections, while also having a population that is largely offended by the idea of having to pay for something that "has always been free!". Maybe they can launch a taxpayer funded EuroTube and EuroGram.
- odyssey7 10mo agoHave consumers ever been offered the ability to pay Google to opt out of advertisements and to opt into privacy?
- tensor 10mo agoSomewhat. You can pay for workspace to keep your email private and ad free.
- dizhn 10mo agoGuarded by a "privacy policy". This is Google. How come this "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" crowd doesn't get that it doesn't matter if you're paying or not, you're always the product?
- tonyhart7 10mo agoI don't like this argument since this is can be applied to everything and You expect people to roll out their own service for everything since everything is a product in some form or another its okay to depends on some product because they are just good, for example people free to use Office alternative which is free btw but people literally dont choose that because MS Office is just better all of this deep talk discussion is irrelevant since User want an working product that they expect them to its just that
- an0malous 10mo agoApple has been a great privacy advocate but doesn’t get mentioned in comments like these and gets dragged through the mud for having proprietary cables and particular UI aesthetics. It’s interesting to observe who it’s fashionable to hate and the double standards this community applies to tech companies.
- submeta 10mo agoYou mean the Apple that gets targeted by Israel spyware firms constantly? The Apple iPhone used by a Saudi journalist named Adman Khasoggi whose iphone was hacked with Israeli spyware, targeted and murdered? Just one example. Apple devices aren’t secure either.
- an0malous 10mo agoI mean the Apple that refuses to build government backdoors in spite of intense pressure from possibly the most powerful entity in the world, the US military intelligence community. You're also conflating security with privacy, a security hole is unintentional it's not like they were selling their customer's information. No system is perfectly secure. Apple has done more to address those issues than any other tech company. They’re targeted because they’re popular, maybe your antagonism should be directed towards the country that openly sells such software to murderous authoritarian regimes or the government that condones it from their alleged “greatest ally”
- bigyabai 10mo agoRefuses is not the right word, there is no way to audit Apple's refusal or hold them accountable here. US Senator Ron Wyden whistleblew how iOS Push Notifications are collected by US intelligence, which is concerning when you consider how much iMessage relies on it: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surveil-push-notifications/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve... https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/imessage_push_notifications_hard_to_block https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/imessage_push_notificatio...
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- GeoAtreides 10mo ago>American tech companies have been pushing the needle on privacy ever since Google. Then Facebook. They've gradually normalised that privacy does not exist, all for their own capital gain. Great subthread to remind that your HN data (comments and maybe more) is shared and licensed with all Y Combinator startups. It's also impossible to delete your own data, either on HN or data shared with the Y Combinator startups (except by some 'beware of the leopard' email procedure). This is not being made clear when registering a new account.
- datahungrydang 10mo agoseconded. even if you happen to figure out where to send your email they just refuse and say its unfair to them and others to ask for it to be deleted. its pretty shameless. if I ever hit it big one of my expenditures will be suing to force them to honor deletion requests.
- sam_lowry_ 10mo agoI was the admin of a small social network for many years, and I understand the message @dang was trying to convey. If you were actively commenting, you are basically asking to break the flow of discussion among many participants. And yes, this is unfair to others. My rule of thumb was to honor the deletion requests for those who were little involved in the community. For others I would disable their account, anonymize their login name and remove sensitive details in discussions. This is how it worked until toxic behaviour, facebook and telegram made my little social network redundant.
- ifdefdebug 10mo agowell I AM aware that my comments here are shared with the whole world, which Y Combinator startups are a subset of...
- realitysballs 10mo agoI already assumed that. But maybe I’m the minority. Unless someone explicitly says they are privacy focused, I assume the worst and anonymize
- port11 10mo agoSadly this is a choice outside the hands of most people, given you can't influence what services your hospital uses. I do agree we should favor local solutions, but Zivver was local until the sale.