zlacker

>>pbrw+(OP)
Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs.

The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).

The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.

I could point to many instances of this but the easiest one is the EU commission currently pushing a ban on encryption.

>>pembro+eb
I just want to note that even if you are only afraid of the government in regards to privacy and not companies guess who those companies sell your data and privacy to. As an example the US government already buys location data from companies [1]. Protecting your privacy from the government (while also important) isn't enough due to companies sharing their data with the government, sometimes even for free and without being forced to do so [2]. Therefore you can't protect your privacy from the government without also protecting it from companies.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/tech/amazon-ring-police-f...

>>FinnKu+GO
> Therefore you can't protect your privacy from the government without also protecting it from companies.

This is reasonable.

Though knowing that the data used to serve ads has very little overlap with the information that governments are interested in, makes this move more pointlessly destructive.

Funny enough, the data that governments are interested in isn't getting restricted. There are laws about how to protect that store that data, but that data is not being restricted.

Let's not pretend that governments are going to tell companies to stop collecting data, that they are inherently interested in procuring.

>>JAlexo+Uf1
Well, the EU is telling companies to stop collecting data they themselves are very interested in. For example Google was fined for misleading settings that enabled them to track locations [1].

You can't look at governments, but especially the EU, as a single entity. Some parts of it want to collect all data possible while others want to protect your privacy. Here is a good article on how EU courts and the Irish government for example had very different views on this topic [2].

The general pattern you can observe is some political entities and/or countries really like to push surveillance and data retention laws in the name of security, sometimes without possible understanding the amount of misuse this could enable [3]. On the other hand privacy activists and other political entities and/or countries fight back against those and push for laws protecting privacy and your data or prohibit mass surveillance [4]. Sometimes those political "battles" are pretty obvious, with a recent example being the chat-control plans of the European Commission that the European Parliament will hopefully/likely reject [5].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/12/google-android-location-tr... [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/data-retention-europe-mass-s... [3] https://netzpolitik.org/2021/urgently-needed-france-spain-pu... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/11/23719694/eu-ai-act-draft-... [5] https://www.aol.com/privacy-busting-chat-control-plans-17282...