What makes you think that EU governments don’t collect data from companies such as Hetzner or OVH, the same way that US collects from Microsoft or Google?
I'm curious, do you have a source for your claims?
> German and UK citizens got canceled, fined or SWATTED for calling their elected rules stupid/corrupt on social media
Being "canceled" isn't a defined term. Being SWATted has nothing to do with state censorship, it's people abusing emergency services.
Getting a fine by the government for calling "elected rules stupid/corrupt on social media" would be the only thing you mentioned that would count as state censorship. Do you have a link to a case where this happened?
> in Germany you get a fine for downloading a song/movie
You don't get a fine for legally downloading movies.
There's an industry of lawyers profiting off of IP and copyright laws, yes.
Not being able to pirate movies isn't state censorship.
Those who make bold claims, need to back them up with evidence.
From following your other comments, you seem to be confused by Germany's version of what in the USA is known as Defamation lawsuits, and you're mixing it up with what is commonly known as "free speech", or the restriction of it.
If you want to argue in good faith, you should share some facts instead of sending people to Google. I am closely watching German politics and still have no idea what are you talking about. Maybe my search query is wrong, maybe you are just making this up.
You can express your opinion about everything and everybody, including politicians, in public as much as you want in germany. But first paragraph in the german constitution is about human dignity ("Menschenwürde"), not freedom of speech. Which means, that when you insult somebody in public, it can happen that the affected person might sue you, and that a court might judge that you hurt the person's dignity. The consequence might be, that you have to pay a fee.
Recently there were cases of police operations at the homes of people who where accused of insulting a politician. Those operations where heavily criticized in the german public and followed by a court rouling, that judged that the police overreacted in those cases.
Somehow, in certain circles, this whole story gets shortened to "If you criticize the government in germany, your home gets raided by the police".
Please tell me how you think this "protect one's honor" law doesn't get abused.
Also, an youtuber from my country made a video during the pandemic exposing the mistreatment of seasonal fruit picking workers from my country working in Germany, and the video got blocked in Germany by Youtube, most likely on request by flagging.
So do do you expect to learn about censorship of German media if you follow German media which is subject to censorship? Do you realize the irony of it all? Did you ever expect for German media to go out and say "here's how we're censoring you"? Germans are living in Plato's cave allegory and are irate when people call them out for it.
> So do do you expect to learn about censorship of German media if you follow German media which is subject to censorship?
I‘m used to work with various sources of information professionally and don’t get breaking news from Reddit. Free media do not exist. They all have certain alignments or views, they are all censored by governments etc. Russia just pushes news agenda from the top, America works in more subtle ways, through denial of access (I‘m complicit here), in Germany that’s mostly lawyers, publishers with agenda and (surprise!) privacy laws. Nevertheless it is still possible to stay updated and extract a lot of information even from censored media, sometimes reading between the lines. Overall I think German media do enjoy a lot of freedom.
I still do not understand how is this related to privacy. Yes, in democracy all things are important and connected. But the original claim was that somehow we have a problem with it. What is the problem?
If you think you truly are up against an echo chamber then it’s in your best interest not to make a big show of martyrdom, claiming to be persecuted by it. Most posts that mention being downvoted become targets for further downvoting. Don’t break the fourth wall.
It’s not about what’s right or wrong, it’s just trying to appeal to a place’s sense of shame when you’ve failed to secure any local support just makes you look bad, and like you’re grandstanding.
I'm not trying to secure support, I don't give a shit about that since I'm not running for president, I'm trying to speak my mind. If people don't want to hear it it's their loss, not mine.
The only reason I was pointing it out the downvotes is that I'm baffled about the amount of ignorance and groupthink on a website of people who see themselves as free and critical thinkers, yet display the same pre-programmed NPC behavior as bots. If a comment doesn't match their world view, they downvote without giving a second thought to look deeper into the claim.
Many on here don't seem to understand this has nothing to do with privacy.
It's about sovereignty - if DJT can turn off your digital infrastructure on a whim, you are in a very precarious position. That's why both Canada and Europe are in panic mode and looking for alternatives.
Thank you for pointing that out! I would add that intelligence agencies and law enforcement are almost completely exempt from all those fancy GDPR requirements.
Furthermore, in the EU, there is no such a strong equivalent to the 4th Amendment. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can access your cloud data without needing a warrant—unless the data is stored in the US in which case a US judge would have to approve it. This is one of the reasons they are so eager to keep it "home".
The craziest thing is what happened with Encrochat and SkyECC. These two services made the critical mistake of trusting OVH to host their servers, and then OVH literally placed law enforcement and intelligence agency backdoors on them. Eventually, they even used these backdoors to send malware to users' devices, not caring whether they were located in the EU or not.
While all this was happening, the founder of OVH appeared on a popular YouTube tech channel and proudly explained that, unlike Amazon and Google, they weren’t sniffing their customers’ data. What a liar!
> Furthermore, in the EU there is not something such as the 4th amendment, Law Enforcement and Intelligence agencies can grab your cloud data without requiring a warrant. Unless the data is stored in the US, which is one of the reasons they are so eager to keep it "home
You're commenting under an article that explicitly says how US intelligence agencies and police get around the need for warrants. Many rights in the US are more theoretical than practical if someone in power decides so.
Also, there are strong expectations of privacy in the EU, as well as due process, warrants, etc. There are of course abuses, and especially "terrorism" can enable some shortcuts (to be fair, often for very good reason multiple EU countries have had tens to hundreds of dead from terrorist attacks that could and should have been prevented), but I don't have the impression it's in any way even close to as bad as the US. Do you have any information/sources to the contrary?
"Because the SR Server was located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment would not have required a warrant to search the server, whether for its IP address or otherwise."
To me this statement only makes sense if it explains why an American law enforcement agency can hack a foreign server without an American warrant. And it just demonstrates the limits of American privacy protection.
If you think this was about European legal system, you are mistaken. If Americans were hacking European servers without due process involving European authorities, this was probably highly illegal here.
Their servers were found or their encryption were broken under mysterious circumstances involving classified "techniques".
In 3 out 4 cases malware was sent from the services to their users once taken over.
All were hosted in the EU, even stranger, all of them had servers hosted by OVH. Although SR was not directly hosted by OVH Ross Ulbricht had a vnc server (virtual desktop) there which he apparently used to administrate the SR main server and on another OVH server he had a deadmanswitch and his will.
In a sense this is the counterpart to the survival bias. But in this case we only know where the taken down services were hosted, we don't know where the survivors are being hosted.
All this has serious Crypto AG vibes. Back then it was: trust us, we are from Switzerland, we are neutral....
It doesn’t make sense to build a conspiracy theory on randomly selected facts, when there’s an obvious explanation that in all those cases the law was broken and law enforcement acted as they were supposed to act. Other ISPs and hosting providers are cooperating with lawful requests too.
I do not see any lies or omission of important details in this document. Looks like OVH complied with some legal request and just handed over everything they had, including encrypted copies of hard drives. Americans then just cracked the root password.
Your comment needs some serious fact checking. For example, Encrochat backdoor was authorized by judge, so there was a due process. And it was not an ordinary customer.
How? They busted huge criminal network and linked the app itself to a criminal gang. This is how the law enforcement should work. Every human right, including privacy, has limits and the purpose of the law and the due process to establish where those limits should be. It would be strange to expect that privacy of a human trafficker or drug dealer is protected more than the rights of the people they harm.
They intercepted and read the messages of most users, yet the number of arrests is significantly lower than the total number of SkyECC and EncroChat users.
Not only that, but they also have charged and are attempting to jail the creators of these phones/end-to-end messaging apps.
With what is happening it is becoming pretty much impossible to provide backdoor free communication tools within the EU.
"Privacy" went down the drain long time ago. It's good to be aware of the worst offending policies of specific countries and providers. UK and Germany take inglorious lead. Is it worth considering the alternative is consolidated abuse by oligopoly of US providers? Your choice.
Otherwise EU is worse in terms of privacy. UK (while not officially in Europe) goes even beyond, requiring backdooor to iCloud and non-eu providers.