European countries aren’t known for strong privacy against the state. There are exceptions, but the EU’s “privacy rights” are almost exclusively against corporations.
American privacy, by contrast, is almost exclusively focused on state surveillance.
There are holes, the biggest being that foreigners on foreign soil have no privacy rights. Nor do the dead.
But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have against state surveillance.
Europeans aren’t willing to spend the money to do massive spy programs. Ok, fine. But that’s not the same as having civil liberties opposition.
Switzerland has a reputation, good and bad, for strong privacy. But that’s not the norm.
I read an article that dug into public GDPR cases, which is a surprisingly small set, and it explained they have had a near zero impact on the massive advertising and data broker industry. They mostly just have a large back log of legal cases against large US companies like Google which occasionally result in fines - but even that moves very very slowly and has little impact on their global business models. They do also occasionally charged a few smaller European companies a few grand for violations.
The key thing is that companies like Google and Meta run giant ad networks, there's many thousands of companies buying ads then collecting data in their own systems and reselling it.
The privacy issues of data retention on Google/Meta/etc social and SaaS platforms is something to care about but it is only a small piece of the puzzle of data privacy.
Ads will remain a major business for the foreseeable future as nobody is going to pay $5/m to use Instagram with no data collection.
I think the US basically sees DMA, GDPR, etc as a tariff
It’s definitely made browsing the open web a worse experience. There should be global opt in/out.
> But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have against state surveillance.
Me neither. Lately the EU Commission came up with a plan to create an inventory of every single valuable items owned by every single EU citizen: from Magic The Gathering and Pokemon cards to jewelry/heirloom, paintings, gold and silver coins/bars, cryptocurrencies coins, watches, cars, boats, etc. Anything with some value: would go in the inventory. The European Parliament asked the question: "Can you guarantee us this will never ever be used as a basis to confiscate these items?" to which the European Commission answered: "No, we cannot guarantee that".
That's basically where we're at in the EU now.
Full commie style inventory of every single item with any value. And it's obvious that either taxation of confiscation is the end goal.
It's not passed yet as a law, but that's the kind of thing the EU Commission has its busy bees working on.
If I have to choose: as an EU citizen I'm not just a bit but much more comfortable with my data in the hands of US companies than EU ones. Now of course I'd prefer my data to be neither with Uncle Sam nor with the EU but that's not realistic.