
It’s time to extend the US Privacy Act to EU citizens - howlden
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2014/11/its-time-to-extend-us-privacy-act-to-eu.html
======
flexie
In general, whenever it comes to human rights - or civil rights as Americans
like to call it - it's appalling that they distinguish between citizens and
foreigners (or aliens as they label us).

Imagine European countries denying human rights to non citizens: Okay to
torture a Somali? No problem throwing Americans in prison without trial? Sure,
let's wiretap cell phones of all Turks in Europe? I don't think so.

~~~
crazypyro
Slightly offtopic, but since you seem to take a small offense, or at least,
use it as fuel for your argument....

Alien is simply a historical term. It is derived from the latin term alienus
which means something that belongs to another. So an alien to a country
represented someone who belonged to another country. There is nothing rude or
egregious about that label....

~~~
ta75757
As a former "alien" myself, I was never offended by this. It's a technical
term.

------
abaco
Problem is quite a few european countries right now don't trust american
companies anymore so they are working on their own mail service, cloud,
network and hardware components, ... (you know if american companies agreed
with american government to spy on us they kinda deserve a nice f __k off).

So who is damaged by this european behaviour? American companies. And now
Google is suddenly concerned about our privacy.

Middle finger?

~~~
thisjepisje
Middelvinger.

But seriously, got some more info on these European services? I don't watch
these matters very closely lately, would be interested in looking into it.

~~~
abaco
I am italian, would be surprise if a member of our government is even able to
switch on a computer.

But I know that in Germany (for example) this problem is a big thing
[http://www.zdnet.com/worried-about-your-email-security-in-
ge...](http://www.zdnet.com/worried-about-your-email-security-in-germany-safe-
messaging-is-on-the-rise-7000029018/)

[http://www.bohnen-
kallmorgen.com/root/index.php?page_id=123](http://www.bohnen-
kallmorgen.com/root/index.php?page_id=123)

~~~
BillFranklin
In Germany the privacy laws are incredibly strict but fair to consumers rather
than corporations.

------
mcmillion
Wait, we have a Privacy Act? I'm assuming it doesn't work, then.

~~~
higherpurpose
And you're probably right. Is this the same 30 (?) year old Privacy Act that
allows law enforcement to get our emails after 180 days without any warrant,
because they are considered "abandoned"?

In the meantime, Google is trying to push everyone to _archive_ rather than
_delete_ emails with its new Inbox client, making it once again very
convenient for law enforcement to get this sort of data from us without too
many obstacles.

And what's happening with that E2E plugin for Gmail? Is it still coming?
What's the progress on that? Will it even work with Inbox? Because they seem
to have pretty opposite goals. Maybe I wouldn't mind it too much, if I didn't
know Google wants to eventually _kill_ Gmail.com and replace it with Inbox.

------
chappi42
Google: You'd better listen to us than opposite.

Other than in UK I'm more than happy with European privacy legislation
compared to US. It's imageable that we could grant Snowden asylum, but you
would put him in jail for 20 years at least. There are also - afaik and except
UK - no laws which enforce corporations to spy on behalf of the government
without being able to stand behind these actions.

Right to forget. Would such a thing come from the US?

~~~
sschueller
We in Switzerland also have our own privacy laws and we don't care much for
the US ones.

There was a scandal recently with a political staff member being involved in
pornos. US papers plastered her face all over while censoring any naughty
parts. In the Swiss press her face was covered to protect her privacy while
the rest was not covered.

Also if you are accused of a crime and are a public figure you won't have your
name and face printed all over the papers because you might actually be
innocent.

~~~
eyeareque
The US says we are innocent until proven guilty. But as soon as you are
arrested that information is public. They shouldn't be able to destroy you
publicly if you haven't been convicted.

We really need to fix this.

------
tgb
I find the situation where we grant rights to our citizens without granting
them to foreigners (particularly citizens of our close allies, but also
foreigners in general) bizarre and backwards. While I'm sure that there are
some rights that cannot be extended to non-citizens, it seems that the default
should be to treat all people independently of their country of origin unless
there are strong arguments why we cannot.

~~~
jeremysmyth
Rights (as they exist today) are based in legislation. Legislation is
fundamentally political. Politics is glorified tribalism.

While the people who formulate and enforce our rights are put there by
geographic tribes, you won't see rights that stretch far beyond your borders.
It's only when a community that is no longer geographic in nature forms tribes
that we see the geographic tribes pay attention to the rights of "foreigners",
and not because they're foreign, but because they're important to their own
voters.

------
higherpurpose
Meanwhile in US Congress:

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/12/new-
spy...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/12/new-spying-laws-
cybersecurity-nsa-fbi)

------
tete
Given the secrecy on this topic, the anti-democracy that was revealed by
Snowden and how the US government (and other institutions) deals with this
makes that sound very naive. As sad as this might make me I do not see
ordinary democratic ways working anymore in the US. However I'd love to see
someone proving me wrong.

~~~
shitehawk
>However I'd love to see someone proving me wrong.

Legalization of marijuana. The government is absolutely against it but
helpless to stop it.

~~~
tete
I have been thinking about this, but it actually seems kinda weird.

So we see a country where there is capital punishment, but it's fine to smoke
weed. It feels a bit like government are more in favor of drugs than they want
to pretend, not only for the good of drugs being legal, but because someone
who is under influence of drugs - any kind of - is less likely to be
politically active or reject orders. This has been used in military and in
many authoritarian governments.

It could be even worse. It's a topic, like many others that are mostly
artificial. It's not a complex topic at all. It's a good distraction from
other things.

When it comes to people dying, be it the death penalty or wars then the US
looks like a one-party system. Republicans tend to be for death penalty, but
even Obama is according to Wikipedia.

When it comes to war politics it remains the same. Most anti war movements are
killed off in many ways: controlled media, violence and arrests at
demonstrations, infiltration of social networks (as outlined by Edward Snowden
releases), the suicide letter to MLK, that just was on the front page,
COINTELPRO, overthrowing (democratic and non-democratic) governments, ...
There has been no change in more than 50 years on these.

There doesn't seem to be strong opposition to marijuna, just it gives you a
bad image to start out with.

~~~
shitehawk
Occam's razor. People wanted to make it legal and voted that way. The mental
contortions needed to support your theories are too great.

~~~
tete
Wait, what? What theories?

I just don't think that politicians care that much about legalizing marijuana.
Why would they?

And the other statement that I made is that legalizing marijuana isn't
something successful politicians start out with alone. Usually that worsens
there image.

Theories?

The other (unrelated) things I pointed out was that the US has a history of
oppressing opposition, which is history. See the mentioned COINTELPRO. Known
history.

Then I pointed out the the US overthrows governments in multiple ways. Also a
well-known fact. Obama mentioned it once. The CIA released the documents on it
last year. Nothing new. Known history again.

Martin Luther King Suicide Letters. That just was on HN. Official documents
again. Again known history.

I am confused about where you see a theory.

~~~
shitehawk
>It feels a bit like government are more in favor of drugs than they want to
pretend, not only for the good of drugs being legal, but because someone who
is under influence of drugs - any kind of - is less likely to be politically
active or reject orders. This has been used in military and in many
authoritarian governments.

~~~
tete
As for the government being more in favor than they want to pretend: I live in
Europe. Here every now and then the legalization of marijuana comes up.
However when a politician or a political party agrees the public opinion about
that person tends to go down, because he gets that "drug junky" image that has
no important topics to talk about. Happened like three or four times in the
last decade. Therefor if you are a politician you don't want to look like
active supporters. I guess in the US it is similar.

The second part of the statement was that it has been used in military and to
calm populations. If you think that statement is bold already then you
probably don't know about various projects like MK Ultra.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra)

Oh and the effect of drugs being illegal can again be read up in history.
There has been prohibition.

If I sounded like marijuana was a conspiracy I am sorry. That's not what I
meant. Like I said I just think that the image of a politician who publicly
states that marijuana tends to drop. I think that is because a big portion of
the population doesn't have a really strong opinion on that topic, but are
careful about it. That's a theory now. ;)

There also was a something on political activism of population in relation to
the state of legal (or cheap/available) drugs here on HN at some point.

------
mariusz79
Sorry, but Google is probably the biggest threat to our privacy.

~~~
stephenr
I couldn't agree more.

The concept of trusting what is essentially an Ad company with a penchant for
spending it's profits on projects to convince the tech community it's "cool"
on anything privacy related is either the greatest practical joke of the 21st
century or the reason we can't have nice things.

~~~
minot
Why in the world would Google disclose information about you to its customers
when it can probably make more money by being squarely in the middle?

>> Hello, do you need to find someone who might be interested in buying Toyota
cars? What's the message that you'd want plastered all over the Internet for
this guy? OK, just sign this check and it will be done.

~~~
stephenr
At what point did I say Google was disclosing information about me?

Every software product Google puts in the market, from web search to Gmail to
Google Apps to Chrome to Android - they are all about collecting personal
information, building a huge bank of data about individuals.

I don't care if they never intend to disclose that information to someone
else. I care that they are actively engaged in collecting the information in
the first place.

Further more - online advertising can work just fine without collecting such
ridiculous amounts of information about people. Let me give you an example.

A Toyota dealer (or the marketing department of Toyota itself) buys ads from a
search engine.. let's call it.. Hoogle.

I decide i want to buy a new car, so I go to my favourite search engine...
Hoogle... and I search for "new cars in <location>".

Somehow, through the magic of common sense, an ad, placed by Toyota, a CAR
company, registers as being related to a search for "new CARS". They show me
the ad.

Oh and look. They didn't need to circumvent browser security policies around
how cookies are handled, they didn't need to scan all my email, they didn't
need to track the SSID of my local Wifi network...

------
nl
Speaking as an Australian: _Hello! Yes please?_

~~~
tete
May be related to Australia being a part of the Five Eyes.

Keep in mind though that the UK is a special case in the EU in many many ways.

However there are many organizations, countries and interests involved here.
There are the US, the rest of the world, the EU, the NATO, the Five Eyes,
other trade agreements and even lots of special agreements (partly known for a
long time, partly due to the Snowden revelations) with countries such as
France, Germany and others, like Austria (there is a UN HQ, next to a
espionage outpost by the NSA).

We now know that pretty much every US embassy also has a lot of SIGINT going
on, same for US military bases (they still exist!) in Germany. There are
"privately" owned places by the NSA, secret agreements with governments,
companies, institutions, etc.

When a country secret laws (or interpretations of such), operates secret
prisons, outposts, spies on embassies and international institutions, operates
spy satellites that happen to be next to telecommunication satellites, etc.
then it's really naive to think they you change some laws and things won't be
happen anymore.

Do you really think in a country where agencies spy on the senate, where there
are secret interpretations of laws by secret courts that democratic means have
any chance of working?

Also given economical and military power how do you want to put pressure on
the US? Even with some economic power the US military is still the biggest and
best funded and as history has shown it's not only there for defense.

I don't think this can be changed easily, not because of thinking bad of the
US (government), but because the system is big and strongly relies on these
things. Big, complex systems are incredibly hard to change. The technicians
here probably understand that.

Don't get me wrong. It may be possible, but the chance is low and fundamental
changes might even lead to unrest. That's sad, but changing the system has
been tried in many ways, even in the US, but the way the economic and military
system works right now usually got strengthened or made more static. It's
maybe what you'd call a technical debt in the sense that you build up on
something that's not right.

You might wanna try a rewrite, but think about "rewrites" are in the context
of a country. I am thinking about the French Revolution or "tearing down" of
Germany after World War 2 here.

The US also has no history of that really being possible, because they never
lost in the sense of needing to rebuild, while in Europe alone in the past 100
years everything changed completely in the couple of 100 years.

You can't blame the US for not doing that. It's not nice. Maybe a better way
is possible, but so far history has no real examples of it, especially not for
countries (or realms) that were so big and complex. Maybe it would even be
better to do it small scale, maybe even by the states in the US declaring
independence, because big realms tend to end up with one or two totalitarian
systems in between and millions of death. Smaller countries or simply groups
of fewer people tend to be more flexible (see startups).

Maybe there is another way. It would be really great if a lot of things would
change, because currently civil rights that were made in order to prevent a
lot of bad things from ever happening again are by many not considered
something of value anymore (even though people like to pretend otherwise, but
civil rights, human rights are by definition and intention nothing that you
only care for when things are good).

~~~
tete
Can't edit anymore, so here a second posting. Since what I wrote probably
sounds a bit bold I want to add a reference tho this.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who advised many US presidents in the last couple of
decades wrote many books. Among those books there is The Grand Chessboard. It
explains a really large part of the US politics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard)

------
Aoyagi
Yeah, well this wouldn't be as much of a problem if Google didn't harvest all
the data just because they can, would it?

~~~
Oletros
Yap, they harvest email data because they can /s

------
Achshar
Why just EU? The EU delegates can pressure US to cover anyone under the act
not just EU residents. If US bends to EU's demands about privacy but doesn't
treat rest of the world similarly then it says something about US.

~~~
jdimov
EU "delegates" don't have what it takes to pressure the US on anything. It's
usually the other way around. EU regularly bends to US demands, not vice-
versa. E.g. providing the NSA with personal data for all airline passengers
flying in or out of Europe...

~~~
shitehawk
The US and EU are sharing data both ways. That is not a popular fact because
then you can't demonize one side.

------
adventured
It's often claimed that politics in the US is run by / dominated by
corporations.

I find the contradiction in that claim at times like this to be especially
dramatic. The biggest corporations in America - Apple, Microsoft, Google,
Facebook, Amazon, etc - are actively being harmed by the US Government. US
telecoms are having the doors shut to business in Europe and Asia, because of
this stuff. Countless billions in profit are at stake.

Another headline from today: corporations are holding $2 trillion overseas,
because of the wonky corporate tax policies of the US. If corporations
actually ran anything, that wouldn't be a problem.

~~~
Tombone5
The wonky thing being that they would have to pay tax on that money if they
take it to the US, but they've already made all that effort not to pay tax on
the income in the country of origin! (sad face)

~~~
adventured
It's part of the absurdity that is the US tax code.

I think it was Bill Clinton (among countless others) that elaborated how the
obvious thing to do, is to compress the corporate tax rate down to close to
20%, and eliminate most of the tax gaming (simplification).

We could continue to tax corporations at a reasonably competitive rate (vs the
rest of the world), simplify the tax code drastically, and keep tax revenue
approximately the same. That we can't seem to do something so obvious, which
has lots of support from both parties, draws a pretty big sad face from me.

------
BjoernKW
That or the NSA could simply stop indiscriminate spying of the general public.

Why not solve the actual problem instead of making small amendments that at
best serve as a sales arguments for Google in Europe?

------
alimoeeny
While you are at it, why not include all humans? Why just EU?

~~~
tete
Thousands of employees of all the agencies would become jobless. You don't
really want that, do you? ;)

Contracts with private organizations would also be affected. The whole economy
would break down! [sarcasm]

------
Spearchucker
There is a lot I like about the US. Trust the US however, I cannot. Whether
this passes or doesn't. There's been to much of the bad stuff for too long.

------
IBM
Looks like Google is really worried about the antitrust movement getting steam
in the EU. That's probably why MG Siegler is in the EU now.

------
drderidder
EU privacy laws are already stronger than in the US. All Google needs to do is
to actually abide by them, but being based in the US, evidently they can't.
The fact that they have to try to change US government policy in order to
extend privacy to their international users is a pretty sad state of affairs
and a warning to potential international clients.

------
malandrew
I think it's time the reverse is also true, since governments are only half of
the problem. Companies are the other half. EU privacy rules need to be applied
to US citizens as well.

Between apply the US Privacy Act to EU Citizens and applying EU privacy rules
to US citizens, both US and EU citizens will enjoy less surveillance from
governments and corporations.

------
NiftyFifty
Any observation by Google of the EU Safe Harbor Act in this post?
[http://www.export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018365.asp](http://www.export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018365.asp)

~~~
M2Ys4U
The Safe Harbo(u)r agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on. In fact
I'd bet that it will struck down in court for breaching human rights.

------
exabrial
I would say: Canada, Britain, and Australia yes. They're consistent and steady
allies. To the rest of the EU, who is hellbent on giving America the finger
whenever possible... sorry about it. Clean up your act, kick the spies, human
trafficking, blatant corruption, sympathy for murderous regimes out of your
countries, and we'll think about this. We're not perfect either, but we're
trying. Show the same effort and we can move forward.

~~~
rotinomlled
Hah! And I thought HN was for the most part troll-free.

------
bubblemachine3k
Careful, we really don't want to set any precedent for pushing American law
onto other countries - PATRIOT ACT anyone?

------
hoozters
If only Obama was in some sort of position with power to do
something....................................

------
sigzero
Get your own Privacy Act! And get off my lawn!

------
4684499
EU is a part of the US, surprise.

