Any discussion about what can be done to help protect people's privacy and safety would go a lot smoother and progress faster if they'd skip all the theater and stopped pretending to take meaningful action. It's a waste of everyone's time.
Understandably, we don't want our citizens to be spied upon by the US and have all that data stored in the US.
Unfortunately, our "solution" is to create regulations which cause so much disadvantage to European tech companies, that we will see our citizens use even more US built tools in the future.
We already live in a mostly US-built internet. Throwing more and more regulations at it only cements this situation.
It seems there is nothing to get out of this rut. Looks like we will keep feeding the patient a treatment that worsens their condition.
What is the "disadvantage" to European tech companies who don't want to spy on anyone? What advantage do Europeans who don't want to be spied on gain by using US services that will spy on them instead of using European ones that couldn't spy on them as easily/completely due to pro-privacy laws?
There's also less of a culture of "pour billions into tons of startups and see what sticks", which is a market distortion of its own. That aspect is drying up in the US though, thankfully.
The only way I see Europe develop it's own internet tech and big businesses, is to copy what China did by simply blocking the foreign competition. Today there would be no Weibo, Baidu, Alibaba or Aliexpress without it. And I don't see a problem in that approach, but wouldn't mind being educated otherwise.
Edit: I wish at least some of the people downvoting would have the intellect to form a paragraph of counter arguments, so I could understand why. It's like a sports event in here.
Just one.
It’s also easy to misunderstand the sentiments, from the comments here. We Europeans do not hate the US or American companies in general (though some are evil, of course, just like some European ones). OTOH we are seeing the privacy nightmare they are building for themselves and really don’t want that, thank you very much.
“Buy European” is limited to nationalist loonies and privacy-conscious nerds, mostly, and in the latter case it’s not because of anti-Americanism. Fix US laws and 1) Americans will live better lives and 2) these sort of issues will disappear.
Trying to guess who will win out is interesting. The privacy vs. surveillance discussion always feels one crisis away from tipping to surveillance (see: 9/11), but the EU privacy lobby is remarkably strong. I also think a market for tech services that don't spy on you is probably pretty huge; by itself it's not a big selling point, but contrasted against services that definitely spy on you (not to mention net neutrality concerns) they look pretty good, plus being able to tap the EU market is a huge incentive. So--no jinx--I think I'm bullish on privacy here, because it seems likely an unholy alliance of capitalists and privacy advocates would be decisive.
[1]: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/short-run-effects-gdpr-techno...
Again.
fool me twice, shame on me.
fool me thrice, ???
profit
Lovely. That makes me feel all warm & fuzzy about data privacy...
/s