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
This very American point of view, for some reason the Americans believe that politicians are some other kind of breed of people coming from somewhere else and they don't have control over them.

The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check. We have control over the governments and it's O.K. to take them down by force from time to time.

Mass protests are a thing and we vote quite often on who are those "government people", what control we have over the companies? It's very scary to let some businessmen to run the the stuff that our lives depend on. Why trust Musk, Gates, Tim Cook or any other magnate act in our benefit when they all show monopolistic tendencies, profit over human lives and rent seeking?

I don't know if the Europeans or Americans are right about it but overall it appears that the Europeans are having it better despite the stats about money showing smaller amounts of it.

>>mrtksn+ql
Americans and Europeans are both right about their own situation, because most European countries have functioning political systems, so there is a good level of popular control over the functioning of the state. The same is absolutely not true in the US due to issues like the senate filibuster, lobbying, campaign financing, gerrymandering, first past the post, and surely others I’m not thinking of.

The US is best understood as a very flawed democracy, somewhere between the extremes of actual authoritarian states on the one hand and modern well-run European states on the other.

>>umanwi+Ct1
I don’t think that the European democracies are that better from the American one, maybe except for some of the smaller countries, but still I think the European mentality trusts their government more than the companies. For example, in most of the Europe, we have central governmental registry for addresses and IDs, and that kind of stuff. On the other hand Americans and the British argue against that kind of databases, and refused to have ID but their intelligence agencies are known to be very thorough on spying on them. Different ways of doing things I guess.