Super Ready wrote:
Good ol' GDPR (the European General Data Protection Regulations) was a step in the right direction. Y'know, that pop-up cropping up on every site now asking if you're ok with specific types of cookies.
From Germany some sites (US newspapers) simply show some text about it's too complicated to comply with those demands. Which is a long way of saying that they (and all their advertising partners) can't collect as much personal data as they would love to.
Ketara wrote:
lord_blackfang wrote:
I'm personally more worried about the re-enacting a weird blend of the rise of Imperial/Nazi Germany in the US and most of Europe
tbh
Please, can the hyperbole. When the US pulls a Xinjiang, or when the
EU starts aggrandising to claim the entire Mediterreanean Sea as their territorial waters, you might have a point. I know there's a wonderful habit in the Western world of acting as if people like Trump/BoJo/Duda are the be all and end all of facism, tyranny, and oppression;
If you only count something as bad when it's about as bad as the worst in the world then you'll be excusing a lot of bad stuff. We don't need to claim the Mediterranean Sea as ours. Europe has been letting refugees drown in the Mediterranean Sea and criminalised the people who try to help. We don't need to extend our power for that:
https://www.msf.org/european-policies-continue-claim-lives-mediterranean-sea-migration
The USA is doing its part too:
https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/18/uterus-collector-removed-illegal-immigrant-womens-wombs-at-us-detention-facility-13292536/
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/like-an-experimental-concentration-camp-whistleblower-complaint-alleges-mass-hysterectomies-at-ice-detention-center/
There's a whole subreddit documenting US police brutality in 2020.
Our governments also use their surveillance capacity against us and you should be wary of all those companies too. They can essentially do whatever they want until the law catches up to whatever they were doing. They are not automatically better just because they are not directly
the government doing shady stuff. They are doing shady stuff with little consequence. There are studies about how Facebook's algorithm is literally making people (they have billions of users) depressed and miserable for a bit of extra revenue (and they knew about it).
https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183915/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331852593_Facebook_Use_and_Negative_Behavioral_and_Mental_Health_Outcomes_A_Literature_Review
https://www.businessinsider.com/study-says-facebook-may-destroy-your-physical-and-emotional-health-2019-9?r=DE&IR=T
China may be doing messed up stuff but when it comes to who can affect me directly then the German government—that repeatedly finds Neo-Nazis in the army, police force, and intelligence agencies (and sometimes even expels them)—is a much more immediate threat.
Even if I used TikTok, Facebook and Google would be a much directer threat to me simply because they are more intertwined with my government (or allied governments) than TikTok is.
What would China do to me, something like this maybe?Following a disclosure that the German intelligence spied on German journalists, the agency is admitting another embarrassing mistake -- that it knew of the abduction of a German national almost two years ago. (
he was tortured at an US black site)
What's your number of affected people for when we are allowed to worry about local issues? When is the abuse that our governments are doing too much? Only once we catch up with China?
