Comment on Backdoors that let cops decrypt messages violate human rights, EU court says

GiddyGap@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That’s because Europe has actual experience with having their privacy invaded. My grand parents grew up burning letters and books after reading them.

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  • GiddyGap@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, it defers a lot from country to country.

    For example, populations in the Scandinavian countries have high trust in their governments and let them collect a lot of private data. They have personal identification numbers that contain lots of personal information that many institutions (e.g. banks) have access to unless you ask for privacy protection. All of this also makes interaction with institutions very streamlined and easy, but it comes at the cost of less privacy.

    In Norway and Sweden, for example, anyone can access personal income data about anyone living in the country. Full transparency, more or less.

    On the other hand, a country like Germany does not issue personal identification numbers because the population is highly skeptical of data collection and registration, a remnant from the wars. Germany is much more bureaucratic and its government less efficient, but Germans prefer the arm’s length approach to government data collection and almost no data is publicly accessible.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      In Germany you have to show some kind of ID - which gets registered in a system - to buy a SIM card, something I never had to do in other countries I lived in, in Europe.

      There is no other point in having such a requirement for stores to record people’s ID when they buy SIM cards than to associate phone numbers with people for surveillance.

      The UK too doesn’t have ID cards or ID numbers for people and yet has the biggest densitity of surveillance cameras in Europe, automated license plate reading cameras in major roads and highways and, as shown by the Snowden revelations, have an even more broad civil society surveillance system in place than the US and, by the way, when that came out the political response was simply to retroactivelly make legal any part of it which weren’t.

      ID numbers are just one big “look over here” distraction from what’s really going on.

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      • GiddyGap@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I didn’t say that Germany doesn’t collect data for basic protection if its citizens and for terrorism prevention (or, some may see that as surveillance). It does. It’s just not shared in a big central system that other institutions and private companies can pull from like it is in the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands.

        E.g. if you move from on place to another in Germany, the government institutions in the two locales don’t talk to each other about that. So, for tax and social benefits purposes, you have to tell each one that you moved. The federal government is also not involved.

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      • redfox@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Since I also appreciate EUs privacy mindset, and you guys actually mentioned interesting things about the various populations, I’m going to post devil’s advocate question:

        Is there anything to allow privacy invasion we should do for law enforcement and CSAM? Since that’s all political excuses for it?

        Here’s a story I heard recently that talks about it from a technician cyber crime podcast: darknetdiaries.com/episode/131/

        Disclaimer: I cried while on a run in the middle of a populated area.

        My emotions on the topic go from shock and sadness to the punisher style rage, and what vigilante justice.

        There’s also apps like kik, where apparently this shit is unchecked.

        So my question is, can we all have our no data collection privacy, but still give law enforcement a way to hunt these pieces of shit into extinction without them overreaching?

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    • cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Are you saying Europe isn’t a country and the countries in Europe have their own laws and history?

      Say it ain’t so!

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      For example, populations in the Scandinavian countries have high trust in their governments and let them collect a lot of private data.

      And that’s very stupid.

      But psychologically this may be a good thing - people learn to not be ashamed of saying “yeah, you can get all this information about me, but it’s simply not your concern, so fsck off” from the very beginning.

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      • GiddyGap@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        And that’s very stupid.

        It may feel stupid to you, but Scandinavia is a very different world than, for example, the US. They’ve never had a reason to not trust their governments. They are among the happiest countries in the world and their economies are outstanding and have been for a long time, and the standard of living is second to none. They feel like their governments work for them.

        Same can be said of Germany, but they’ve obviously gone through different historic events and their approach to government is different.

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  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal… but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.

    If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

    Cardinal Richelieu

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