And they wonder why the anti-American sentiment is growing. I don't like these trends of US dictating EU policy one bit. Sure, US has always had "great relationships" with some European countries after WW2, and many European countries liked US for its culture etc, and have been friendly towards them. But this is getting pretty absurd, with US getting access to EU citizens data and having them dictate the whole EU's privacy policies, too.
This is why we need to move towards having everything encrypted locally, before sent to the cloud, and make it brain-dead easy for most people to do that. Or maybe we'll all start using Bittorent Sync for our own devices.
I think the main reason anti-American sentiment is growing is that the internet is making it harder for the US government to hide the behavior they've actually had for decades. To try and avoid getting any more political, I won't name any names but there is a certain president who is worshiped by a certain large group of people. I suspect that if the internet had been big then the perception about him would be radically different.
Then you're not adding anything to the discussion. Some people will know who you're talking about because they know what he did. The rest of us don't know who you're talking about and still don't know what he did.
>Then you're not adding anything to the discussion.
Nonsense and this is a cheap way to try and manipulate me into satisfying your curiosity.
The fact is, my statement probably applies to most (all?) of them in some form or another. As written I'm sure some people will assume I mean someone they know some dirt on and others would pick someone else.
The whole " still don't know what he did" is exactly the kind of politics I wanted to avoid while making my point as anything I would point to in my example is likely to draw out apologists and start a big fight about "what is evil anyway?". Exactly the kind of thing this site doesn't need.
And in any case I was probably specific enough for most to correctly guess who I was thinking of, as it is.
Did you even read the article? This has nothing to do with the EU. The US can obtain data from persons that are not US citizens without a warrant, if this data is stored on servers of US companies.
If the EU doesn't agree with this, it would be better to create an economic environment that facilitates EU-based tech companies, instead of having its citizens depend on US companies.
So the solution for the problem "seizing data from cloud service providers without a warrent" is to blame the EU why they dont build some tec companies that can hop in here?
Following your argument we should have EU and US services only?
We could even turn this around to "The EU can now seize data from US citizen from companies that operate in the EU."
Seizing data without a warrent is always wrong and can never be right regardles of citizenship to any country. Simple example the EU seizes data from US citizen and the US from EU citizen and then they just create an "foreign information exchange database" nobody knows about. Because we have to fight terrorism.
Countries have privacy laws that are regulate how personal data has to be held. These laws are mandatory for any company operating on EU soil for instance, including american companies like google or amazon having EU datacenters.
Now, it might seem ok for you that the US government can obtain the personal data stating that, since these are US companies indeed; but the condition they had for operating in foreign countries was to abide to their laws, including the privacy laws.
Thus, a solution could be for these US companies to close their business in europe; that would help creating an economic environment that facilitates EU-based tech companies...
(though that not the world I'd like to live in...)
Or, putting it other words: the US should create a better legislative environment that facilitates US tech companies to continue to be successful world wide.
This is why we need to move towards having everything encrypted locally, before sent to the cloud, and make it brain-dead easy for most people to do that. Or maybe we'll all start using Bittorent Sync for our own devices.