alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.
Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.
If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.
[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.
Rightfully so.
Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.
There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.
And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?
You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s.
> we really want those border checks back
Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.
Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
Where is the rentseeking in that example? Rentseeking is the expenditure of resources to influence the rules so you can charge rent. The sock merchant in the example isn’t.
Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.
Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.
Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.
The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
>The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you
That's not regulation, that's a reduction in regulation.
First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.
What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away.
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
At least there’s free speech and people are not arrested for mean memes (as is the case in UK and Germany).
Burning bridges with “allies” which were taking advantage of you?
This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.
A group of protesters got 50 years in jail for daring to exercise their constitutional duty against ICE illegally detaining citizens. Meanwhile the J6 thugs all got pardonned by the literal pedophile in office, and not a single Epstein victim got any justice.
European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US?
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord… thanks to EU regs, you’re already behind in tech and giving up more and more ground to China in manufacturing (see planned VW job cuts just this week)
It's not like we can do anything.
We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech.
The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
> All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.
Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.
What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing.
Useless politicans spending time on useless things.
Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people.
I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens
So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.
This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.
In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.
This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.
A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.
The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.
Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world
alright, but the important query is: this isn't happening in a vacuum, there's a lot of various forces.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment. This is unacceptable behaviour, but no politician is ever going to experience any negative consequences over this because they're so very far removed from the democratic process.
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take advantage of the ignorance of the public. They can pursue their favorite policies without consequences, as the EU gets all the blame.
True, this seems to be Denmarks project
As an extension of this, look at the European Commission's response to the Stop Destroying Videogames[0] petition. It's utter dogshit. The petition is a pure consumer protection issue and the Commission's response is "but we can't touch IP rights". Bullshit, you guys made IP rights, you wrote all the rules surrounding them, and Donald Trump is about to drown you with them because America's tech oligarchs figured out your rulebook better than you knew it.
Or, if you think that issue's too niche, look at all the talk of "sovereign clouds". It's almost all "how can we build our own giant polluting AI datacenters" and not "how do we take our data back from the Americans". Because, ultimately, the European Commission is built out of an urge to submit to capital interests. The Epstein class are puppeting the EC in exactly the same way they puppet Donald Trump.
If there is any future in the EU, it will start with abolishing the European Commission to take away the capital class's accountability sink.
[0] For legal reasons, unrelated to Stop Killing Games, but they work together
Still, this is mostly pushed by particular countries (e.g. Denmark), the commission and aggressively pursued by lobbyist. The most democratic body in the EU (the EP) has so far always rejected Chat Control.
Without the EU, this would have been introduced in some member countries much earlier (see also UK).
Yes, EP has rejected it, and now the president of the EP is ignoring that outcome.
It only has to pass once, and we have to scream about it every goddamn time try try. And they'll try and try again and again.
> This is going to further increase anti-EU sentiment.
Rightfully so.
Except for no-roaming-charges within EU, most people can't name one good regulation that came from EU and couldn't be handled individually by their own country. The latest example is 3eur customs tax per every item bought from china, even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + 22% vat on both.... what's the added value of custom tax? who knows, but you pay it anyway). Add all the money wasting, horrible behaviour of politicians in charge, overpaid MEPs for what they do... it's no wonder people hate everything EU related.
All sticks, no carrots.
There's the lack of customs charges for items from other European countries. The common market is a really big advantage. There's the Euro, and in the past, the EU did a fairly decent job at holding large corporations accountable, although that seems to have disappeared with Neelie Kroes' retirement.
And of course the lack of borders. Being able to go on vacation with no trouble is massive. Do we really want those border checks back?
You didn’t need the EU for the removal of trade barriers and the common market. Both were established quite a while before the EU as we know it now became a thing in the 90s.
> we really want those border checks back
Why? You don’t need to be in the EU to belong to Shengen.
The European Union is actually an union of treaties, with countries that sign some and not others. So here you would need to be more specific.
Why one couldn't have all these without the EU ?
Tell me you don't see the value in the tax as a way of discouraging people from ordering a pair of socks from the other side of the globe, while they can buy them locally?
Why let a middleman rentseek?
Where is the rentseeking in that example? Rentseeking is the expenditure of resources to influence the rules so you can charge rent. The sock merchant in the example isn’t.
Are you kidding me..? The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you? Being able to pay in all of those states without paying FX rates, bringing home your purchases across the border without tolls or even checkpoints no less? The funding of a massive amount of public benefit projects in poorer member states, including art and artists, public health and education, infrastructure - all of that isn't worth anything? The ability to trust everything you buy to be safe, from child toys to food to cars? This list goes on for a long time.
Many politicians have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for inconvenient decisions, and people like you continue to spread completely uninformed FUD.
Let's even put aside all the benefits you have but apparently either don't know or don't care about. How well do you think your home country would fare against the USA or China or Russia on its own? The only weapon all of us have against the big power blocks of the world is being a power block on our own.
The EU isn't perfect, and I'm absolutely opposed to the Chat Control bullshit in its entirety, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
>The freedom of movement across all member states, including the right to settle and start a business anywhere you like, that's not a "good regulation" to you
That's not regulation, that's a reduction in regulation.
They just can't let it go.
Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?
It's an open secret the european union has nothing to do with the will of the people
First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time.
The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.
I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?
Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.
What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away.
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.
I'd say the AI powered aspects of it is whats troubling.
We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
> most annoying the cookie law
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
At least there’s free speech and people are not arrested for mean memes (as is the case in UK and Germany). Burning bridges with “allies” which were taking advantage of you?
Didn't we just have a round of people being fired and arrested in the US for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk?
And at least people are not shot in the streets by the police for protesting...
This gets brought up a lot, and I’m not sure how to explain it. But inconsequential complete free speech is not the top issue for some people. People have different priorities.
as long as your mean memes aren't against the POTUS ;)
Europe is over all far more democratic and safer then USA. Including people actually being safer when they speak.
Right now people in the US are being designated as terrorist for being against the government.
And people are literally arrested for touching a pool
A group of protesters got 50 years in jail for daring to exercise their constitutional duty against ICE illegally detaining citizens. Meanwhile the J6 thugs all got pardonned by the literal pedophile in office, and not a single Epstein victim got any justice.
European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US?
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord
Dear lord… thanks to EU regs, you’re already behind in tech and giving up more and more ground to China in manufacturing (see planned VW job cuts just this week)
The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.
It's not like we can do anything. We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
Only Switzerland has a true democracy
We also have representatives. We call it semi-direct democratic system. There is no such thing as a „true democracy“, it’s a set of principles
>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
> All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
Related recent discussion:
>European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)
I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.
Instead of the usual knee-jerk it would be nice to see some level-header analysis on mechanics of these things - who pays for the time of the people that decide to push this particular piece of legislation, how they manage to get into the door, who personally makes the proposal, how they gather support for it.
Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
There's a lot of flip-flopping. I'm surprised Italy changed their mind when they were very in favour until recently.
What's to point of all this? Everyone will use Signal or some other E2E encrypted messenger, this is just bone tossing. Useless politicans spending time on useless things.
Chat control takes screenshots of your phone. E2EE is useless. It's government mandated spyware.
They are talking about mandatory on-device scanning. E2E doesn't solve this.
Might make sense to message the MEP's that oppose chat control moreso the ones that support it. Maybe they can use some of their internal influence to sway some people. I'm pessimistic about the amount of weight these representatives are giving to emails from citizens
So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.
The recent times showed us that technical solutions are bananas.
Guardrails must be put at the constitution level, or any tech bypass can be just declared illegal.
https://delta.chat/en/
Delta Chat does that but it's a bit janky.
This is so wrong, but here’s another reason: a centralized totalitarian approach could look like a very pragmatic way to exercise control and governance on the population. This is true though only if your technical capabilities are at a similar or higher level of your competitors.
In the European case we have neither the technology advancement of the US, or the supply chain control of China.
This means that a centralized approach is only going to create a larger vulnerability surface for an external attacker.
A decentralized, privacy and security first approach isn’t only right for moral/ethical reasons. It’s the only way we have to defend ourselves, even if we had a fascist government.