Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

36% Positive

Analyzed from 2433 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#don#democracy#more#chat#russian#control#european#behind#right#things

Discussion (149 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Havoc•about 1 hour ago
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

theshrike79•23 minutes ago
I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online.

It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.

But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.

And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.

shevy-java•1 minute ago
It's not just killing privacy though. Democracy is undermined here by big money.
OtomotO•31 minutes ago
We are living in a strange mixture of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World
cyanydeez•about 1 hour ago
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.

Xelbair•33 minutes ago
>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?

No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.

Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?

Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.

You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.

Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.

For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.

Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.

If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.

Gareth321•35 minutes ago
The answer to lies is generally sunshine, not censorship. There are just too many examples of censorship eventually being misused by those in power. The power to censor Russia right now might appear appealing to those in charge, but they need to remember, pro-Russian factions may be voted into power in the future, and they will use this power to suppress information they don't like. Once the precedent is created, it's too late to cry about censorship when it's your "side" which gets censored. No one will care.

To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.

orbital-decay•18 minutes ago
Is it a sufficient reason to build a cage for yourself that only needs a single regime flip to turn against you? Is it a sufficient reason to become what you're trying to avoid? Is destabilizing democracy necessary to stop the democracy from being destabilized? No, no, and no.

>russian influence campaigns

Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty.

u8080•34 minutes ago
>who will destabilize democracy

Let's just ban those politicians, ban and censor "bad" media and platforms, and surveil all citizens to protect us from those pesky authoritarians!

tjoff•42 minutes ago
Is eroding privacy the only way to combat that?
egorfine•43 minutes ago
> Is that a sufficient reason for controls?

no.

budududuroiu•37 minutes ago
to argue that the success of the far right nationalists is solely off the back of Russian disinformation campaigns ignores the material reality experienced by far right party voters
gherkinnn•35 minutes ago
Rubbish. Fighting fascism by implementing totalitarian tools is a ludicrous idea.

Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy.

Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.

consensus1•19 minutes ago
And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.
Chu4eeno•25 minutes ago
You know EU has mostly gone after and unpersoned leftoids (and accusing them of working for russia), despite the rightoid wringing of hands?

Look up e. g. HĂĽseyin DoÄźru.

elric•about 2 hours ago
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.
hoppp•about 1 hour ago
They just can't let it go.

Is it democracy if they keep pushing agendas even if they are voted down?

ttoinou•about 1 hour ago
It's an open secret the european union has nothing to do with the will of the people
hhh•39 minutes ago
plenty of people desire something like this, and 'saving the children' is their genuine intent and desire. Humanity is willing to shoot itself in the foot again and again, there's no need for it to be some shadowy cabal.
constantius•24 minutes ago
Plenty of people do want more surveillance, but that's not why EU politicians are doing this. Seeking to implement surveillance across an entire continent cannot be explained by "the will of the people". Danes might want surveillance for their children, but I can't imagine them lobbying their EU representatives to also protect the children in France as well.
surgical_fire•14 minutes ago
This is bullshit. The EU parliament is the organ that shot it down so far.

Read the article. It is the national governments pushing this shit. They try to launder if through the EU because passing those legislations locally would likely be very unpopular.

blfr•about 2 hours ago
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.

m4nu3l•about 1 hour ago
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.

graemep•about 2 hours ago
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.

blfr•about 2 hours ago
Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
sph•about 2 hours ago
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.

iamnothere•about 2 hours ago
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.
dgellow•about 2 hours ago
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
bluecalm•about 2 hours ago
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.

blfr•about 2 hours ago
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.
josmar•about 2 hours ago
Only Switzerland has a true democracy
basisword•about 2 hours ago
>> 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.

enedil•about 2 hours ago
> 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?

olejorgenb•about 2 hours ago
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(!)
vikaveri•about 1 hour ago
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
EdiX•16 minutes ago
"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.

I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.

ezst•about 2 hours ago
> 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.

nxm•about 2 hours ago
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?
tokai•about 1 hour ago
Right now people in the US are being designated as terrorist for being against the government.
tokioyoyo•about 1 hour ago
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.
basisword•about 2 hours ago
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.

microgpt•about 2 hours ago
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.
dminik•about 2 hours ago
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.

gib444•about 2 hours ago
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

spacebanana7•32 minutes ago
A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind.

Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.

nxm•about 1 hour ago
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)
rockinghigh•about 1 hour ago
The US is also falling behind Chinese manufacturing. They had to ban Chinese cars because legacy American automakers couldn't compete.
yownie•31 minutes ago
do you have an original talking point somewhere in this drivel that doesn't sound like it's written by a 15 year old edgelord?
kachurovskiy•about 1 hour ago
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.
Chu4eeno•31 minutes ago
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (no joke).
ChrisArchitect•14 minutes ago
Related:

European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675

r721•about 2 hours ago
Related recent discussion:

>European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657675 (45 comments)

peterspath•about 2 hours ago
Just 4 countries are against: Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, and Poland.

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

sph•about 2 hours ago
There's a lot of flip-flopping. I'm surprised Italy changed their mind when they were very in favour until recently.
AAAAaccountAAAA•about 1 hour ago
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.
roer•about 2 hours ago
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
yownie•29 minutes ago
why have we not heard more of a pushback from business and legal entities regarding privileged communication / protection of trade secrets?
Advertisement
Lucasoato•about 2 hours ago
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.

sandworm101•about 1 hour ago
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.
giuscri•about 1 hour ago
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.

treyd•about 1 hour ago
Delta Chat does that but it's a bit janky.
throw_await•about 1 hour ago
aquir•about 1 hour ago
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.
afh1•about 1 hour ago
Chat control takes screenshots of your phone. E2EE is useless. It's government mandated spyware.
wqaatwt•18 minutes ago
So the EU will just tell Apple and Google to remove Signal from their app stores and 95-99% of the population won’t bother figuring out it exists..
sharperguy•about 1 hour ago
They are talking about mandatory on-device scanning. E2E doesn't solve this.
varispeed•34 minutes ago
In every authoritarian regime people spent considerable amount of time on workarounds. Underground press, parallel education etc. this is just another iteration of Stasi like regime, just with a nicer suit and better PR.

In reality this should have been rejected wholesale and people proposing this barred from any public sector jobs, or even arrested for terrorist attack attempt (Chat Control fulfils definition of terrorism).