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- Hacker News
- So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are. Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up" Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.
A big loser team.
by shevy-java - The US supreme court is correcting the lies the American government made when they assured the EU and its citizens that they can be trusted with their data. It's not just the EU lying, both sides are awful at this.
I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise. It makes sense, because banning EU companies from using AWS/GCP/etc. would bankrupt the EU into a recession, but the way they're going about these things is very annoying.
That said, if the USA would actually keep its promises and adopt legislation that solves the reasons why the EU cannot give out a decent competency decision, the problem would go away entirely.
The Biden administration set up a precarious body within the government to resolve the issue rather than go through the normal lawmaking process, probably because it wouldn't go through.
by jeroenhd - For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."
It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.
by jhanschoo - For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.
These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.
The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.
However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.
I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.
by eesmith - I find it hilarious that the potential effect on EU law didn’t factor into the arguments in this case on either side. I’m not sure anybody involved even knew that the EU relied on FTC independence. Not that it’s relevant to the legal question.by rayiner
- Can someone explain me like im 10 - what exactly is the root problem here? Why all these dances (and wasted taxpayers money) with data living here or there? Isnt it (in general) just another unnecessary pain for good guys while relatively easy solvable issue for bad guys? What do I miss? Genuine question.by aristofun
- As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.
IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.
by atoav - Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?
It's well overdue to take seriously and put all our efforts behind the many (various but little known) local-first initiatives.
See for instance: https://elfaconsortium.eu/ It's a race against time.
by rixed - I do not trust either but you have to at least agree that having some sort of mutually recognised data privacy framework is a good idea because the courts can enforce it then. Saying everything must be from EU is also slightly silly and we should instead have something similar like certification (cyber act ?) to ensure enough competition exists to avoid service degradation. IMO cryptography could be the answer to many privacy related issues for the cross border transfers.
Also these decisions related where the data is stored and which service is used are under control of each commercial org buying them. The risks are assessed at the end of the day and in case of any issues the providers change. Why would a publicly funded org store citizen data in the US is a question regardless of privacy laws though.
by sublimefire - > Public Money, Public Code
This seems like a very good principle to adhere to in general. Anything that is funded by the public needs to serve the public interest, in my opinion.
Putting public money into e.g. proprietary software and proprietary services that are then operated and gated by a few selected companies, for profit, with their only goal being the rent seeking via long term government contracts, is in my opinion far from being in the public's best interest.
by pbasista - > As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.
EU is working on mandating scans of all your private encrypted messages right now. EU data protection is marketing for the gullible.
- The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.by seydor
- Ban, limits, and regulation won’t solve a country with too many worker protections. The EU simply can’t compete in the modern globalized world.by jimbob45
- bans and limits just hurt consumers and freedom of speech. data regulation is useless as you said. what china actually did is a lot better.
they ignored decades worth of friedman inspired economic "theory" and started directly investing in their own industry. most successful chinese tech companies are a joint venture between state owned, municipal and private capital. you can get loans way under market rate if you have a good business plan in a industry the government is treating as a priority.
in america every time someone like obama or biden tried they got shut down by big money interests. any investment is bad because its "picking winners and losers". subsidies are bad because the only way to pay for them is increasing taxes and thats bad for profits. europe should never go down that path.
by tancop - Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.by sublimefire
- The headline is that the US Supreme Court broke the deal that made this work, the EU was perfectly fine with an independent organization managing the problem. Blaming the EU for asking for some basic sanity is ???by hilariously
- Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).
- The EU should cut all ties with the US, tax US products and impose costly (and difficult to get) visas to American citizens wanting to visit.
It won't do any of this because it has no balls and no vision.
We're doomed and it's our fault.
by bambax - Europa, the official web portal of the tech sovereign European Union, will have to change their CDN provider (Amazon's CloudFront).
- Can they even use a CDN now?by hahahaa
- Unless that site collects personal information, it's fine isn't it? This isn't about where stuff is hosted, it's about privacy.by cesaref
- So will https://wero-wallet.eu - you know, the European alternative to VISA/MasterCard.by AndroTux
- Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.
I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out
by amarant - Sadly nothing will change.
- Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.
- Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.
- Majority see these but just move on
- 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat
- Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.
- Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks
- Its f*king broken system
by coffe2mug - The EU will rely on US tech forever because it is literally not possible to create an EU alternative in that business climate. There are no major EU clouds, nor are there any major EU software services and there never will be because the EU is the worst place in the entire world for startups (try starting a company in Germany or France).by 0xy
- The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…by rusk
- As long as US dollar remains the reserve currency, others will have to suck up to the US. This is why moving away from the USD is critical. Beyond that, people should pull their investments away from the US. This is difficult, however: US is the market that offers most returns (as to for how long, that remains to be seen), but it takes only a initial dominos falling.
- pariah: outcast, disliked
piranha: carnivorous fish
- Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch. Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.by manueltgomes
- Yeah the problem with EU is that once "compliance" becomes the only reason, lethargy kicks in. Their players stop competing because they have no incentive to, the compliance will keep them afloat.
I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.
by rdsubhas