Very late response: this comment thread was a general discussion about privacy, it wasn't specifically about the article. And a maaku on HN could easily be thi

Very late response: this comment thread was a general discussion about privacy, it wasn't specifically about the article. And a maaku on HN could easily be this maaku on github from California: https://github.com/maaku https://github.com/maaku And the 'online robots' and 'direction of the government' almost certainly refer to the recent NSA case, which is an American issue. So, yes, the US data protection laws do seem relevant to the conversation.