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> EU commissioners propose laws, they don't vote for them.

The distinction isn't meaningless but it's certainly a generous one when left to stand on its own.

The commissioners hold little allegiance to the spirit of democracy and these proposals are either career boosters or pet projects for them. They're not just going to pass it on to the parliament and leave it at that. They're going to do their best to finagle behind the scenes, horse trade, intimidate and pull from their endless infatuation with coddling the children the most fantastical justifications that, by pure chance I guess, smear any opponents.

> As a brit, let me tell you that leaving the EU will not solve this problem. Your local politicians will just do that anyway.

But it will help. No modern government will pass a law that grants its citizens more privacy. It's better to have a many smaller ones, each with different rates of deterioration (re privacy) than a super government where every little nudge towards the eventual zero-privacy Internet affects us all at once.

Sadly, residing in a region formerly part of the Russian Empire, together with last year's events, kind of kills the glee I felt in the past whenever I fantasized about the EU disintegrating, which is to say voting to leave the EU would only makes sense if online privacy was the only thing you cared about.




>No modern government will pass a law that grants its citizens more privacy.

GDPR was passed not that long ago.


> GDPR was passed not that long ago.

Sorry, I should have been more careful. It's a citizen versus a consumer thing; GDPR is about the latter and does not give you any real privacy gains in regards to your government except in areas where your relationship is business like.

Some Menial Low-Stakes Agency is required to handle your email and address details appropriately, sure, but meanwhile Europol was still able to mass collect data and have the Commission cover for them after they were found out.


GDPR actually specifically regulates citizen-government interactions as well (article 2), with special exceptions for law enforcement (article 2.2.d).

You could of course argue that authorities can still make up any kind of law enforcement related reason to exclude you anyways :)

Edit: My point is sorta that the exceptions are a whitelist not a blacklist.


It's just the same good old EU BAD -> everything coming from there BAD. There's even a comment under this post on how GDPR "degrades the web in the name of privacy", I guess trackers are just way better then cookie banners after all.

Then you read Utah and California have comparable proposals yet I've seen a single mention of them in the whole comment section.




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