As per my comment above, this draft law has nothing to do with Hungary.
The only reason Hungary is currently associated with the "Chat control" draft is because Hungary currently holds the EU presidency and as part of their mandate they are free to set goals and negotiate with other countries in order to come up with future laws.
First, these drafts mostly originate from the EU commission, so Hungary is not the one who came out with it in the first place. Secondly, Belgium which had the presidency a couple of months ago also tried (and failed) to get this draft across the line.
So yes, Hungary, which may or may not be on it's way to become a dictatorship is very happy to keep pushing for these negotiations to happen but let's also take a moment and remember that Sweden, France, Spain and many more countries are also happy with it.
So to me, the question is how can we take EU countries seriously when they talk about privacy when so many of them are ready to create a system of blanket surveillance on all their citizens?
> So to me, the question is how can we take EU countries seriously when they talk about privacy when so many of them are ready to create a system of blanket surveillance on all their citizens?
Well I guess they draw a distinction between allowing state-level actors to access information in the name of stopping crimes and/or national security concerns and allowing the same sort of access to commercial entities.
I'm not saying that justifies it, but it's a different threat model - accessing data about your own citizens for state reasons, rather than collecting data about everyone for commercial gain.
In that case then the definition of privacy needs to change because to me privacy is a binary state. Either I have it or I don't.
Secondly, this piece of legislation is not only a threat to the people of Europe, it is actually a gift to the autocracies of the world like China, Russia and Iran and more who as soon as it is implemented will deploy tremendous amounts of efforts to break into it.
By going forward with this law, we are advertising to the world, hey we got a backdoor here, come and use it! Instead of making it harder for foreign powers to break into our system, we are creating multiple points of failures where the data could be intercepted.
> In that case then the definition of privacy needs to change because to me privacy is a binary state. Either I have it or I don't.
That seems a little, well, binary.
I don't have (nor want) a lot of privacy from my partner. I have a lot more from my boss, who clearly doesn't need to know about the pimple on my ass. He also doesn't need to know my car registration, which the government does, or parts of the government. You need to look at your threat model and understand what it is you want to protect and from whom. "Privacy" is a bit more complex than on/off.
I agree, the backdoor is a poorly thought out idea, it's an authoritarian fantasy which (like many authoritarian fantasies) doesn't take into account the practicality of the idea or the second order consequences. That back door will indeed be a target, so the people of the EU have to worry about not only their own governments misusing the data but (as you say) other powers finding ways in as well.
On the corporate side, the threat model is different - companies don't want the expense of doing security well and they have a profit motive of being able to sell data. This treasure trove could also be useful to foreign actors, or those (like Cambridge Analytica) who would use it for domestic political aims. EU citizens are relatively well protected from this type of threat at the moment, US citizens not so much.
Should weakness in one mean you don't listen to anything out of the EU when it comes to privacy? Again I think that's too binary. The EU has some great ideas and laws about protecting us from the excesses of corporate data hoarding, those should be celebrated, just as we excoriate them on attempts to create a state panopticon.
You obviously have not read about this piece of legislation otherwise you would not have posted this comment.
The law in question also dubbed "chat control" has been on the table for the last 3 years now. It's been rejected each time so far but it comes back every 6 months without fail.
The reason Hungary is associated with "Chat control" this time is because Hungary holds the current presidency of the EU. This presidency changes every 6 months. Before Hungary, it was Belgium which was in charge and they too tried to get this law passed.
This is what a country with the EU presidency does, they set their goals and then try to reach a consensus with the other countries. "Chat control" is one of these goals just like it was one of the goals of the Belgium presidency.
So to come out and say the Hungary is pushing for this because they are Putin's puppet is not accurate at all. The EU commission, which I am pretty sure no one can accuse of being a puppet of Putin is the one who keep bringing this law not Hungary or a specific country in particular.
Now, I am not saying that Hungary is not happy about this, in fact they may well be very glad that this law is being discussed (as it would allow them to enable a state of total surveillance on their citizens) but please let's remember that even Sweden and Spain are amongst the many countries in the EU that are actually supporting this law.
To me that is the bigger problem, how can the EU be so supportive of personal privacy then come out with shit like this?
> Hungary's is one of Putin's puppet regimes, so it's really about Russian-style repression of the opposition
Your first comment was vague and that is why I thought it was worth responding to it. I am glad we agree that Hungary is not the only one who is pushing for this law but you singled out Hungary in your comment so what was the intent there then?
To be honest, I am just a bit fed up with people talking about Hungary as the bad guy in this particular instance due to it's ties with Putin all the while forgetting that even the "nice" and "progressive" countries such as Sweden and France and many others which are usually clamoring for privacy and sovereignty from big tech are also pushing for it.
To me in this specific case Hungary is not the problem. The problem is the law itself and the fact that this law keeps coming back again and again in the so called bastion of democracy that is Europe (supposedly).
Oh sure, friend. Not a puppet, not a puppet. He's stubborn for Russian fossil fuels, held up Sweden's entry into NATO, and curried a thousand other favors, but they were all just meetings of the minds. /s
Same goes for Lukashenko, Maduro, and Vučić, or for Farage, Weidel, and all the other nice folk who used to poll sub-5% before Russia's troll army started peddling their sewage. The only thing less likely than you convincing me that he isn't would be me convincing you that he is, considering that you hopped onto this thread for this argument.
I think this article means well but the advice is dated and times are changing.
Sure nobody is going to kick down your door or send you a fine if your little business is doing 1K or revenue per year but if you start making 100K or 1M then things are going to be different.
Secondly, yes many companies haven't paid their sales taxes for years and nothing bad has happened to them but the governments around the world are not stupid. They can see that they are only getting a small % of what they should be getting so I am expecting that things are going to change pretty rapidly.
Why? Simple, most governments today are broke. Living on debt and saddling future generations with more and more debt each year. Do we really think that they are just going to sit back and relax and watch companies around the world not pay their fair share?
And by companies around the world, I don't mean Apple or Google, I am talking about the small companies, the Shopify stores, the little SaaS just starting out. Apple and Google can fight and delay and financial engineer their way out of this but the small mom and pop shops won't be.
Case and point Stripe just bought Lemon Squeezy. If the MOR model was not needed, if paying sales tax was optional as it was pointed out in this article, why would Stripe bother purchasing this company?
My take is that the days of being a cowboy selling stuff on the internet while "forgetting" to collect the sales tax that is owed are over or will be over soon.
Governments can see that internet companies are making a lot of cash and they want what is owed to them. Should they make it simpler to collect and remit the taxes? Absolutely. But lets call a spade a spade. If you are supposed to collect the sales tax and pay it, and you don't do it, then you are cheating, plain and simple.
We are always rightfully asking governments to tax the companies that offshore their profits like the FAANG companies do, so why should we encourage people to cheat then? Isn't that hypocritical?
You are wrong, most MEPs know that this will break encryption and are more than happy to go for the ride because they have exempted themselves from such regulation. Surveillance for thee not for me.
Chat control is not just the love child from the Swedish politician, it is being pushed by US surveillance companies that convinced the commission members that CP can be detected and stopped only if Europol has access to all your messages, emails, photos and videos until the end of time without having any recourse as to what it will be used for or by whom it will be viewed.
Then there is also Chat Control V1 which is currently extended each year despite being a temporary measure supposedly. Then there is also the data retention directive which everyone knows was illegal to start with and took 10 years to be overturned.
The fact that people still associate EU with privacy is a joke. The EU wants your data just like Meta and Apple or Google. At least Meta is not trying to gaslight me into thinking that giving my data is to save the children or some other complete BS reason.
How do you reason your thinking with the fact that the EU created GDPR?
The EU laws typically fall on the side of promoting privacy and protecting citizens against large multinational organisations (criminal and legitimate).
There is a need for greater powers to prevent crime, but nobody is going to weaken privacy for it. The most likely outcome is a centralised interpol-esque database to track and track suspects more quickly. Right now its very easy for criminals to just change hosting region and the investigating national police have no jurisdiction to do anything. It’s a large issue.
That is not what Chat control is. Chat Control is live analysis of all your messages/emails/photos and videos.
Chat Control breaks encryption because it wants to snoop on the messages/photos before being encrypted EtoE by the messaging providers.
There is no need for greater powers to prevent crime. It has been determined that there isn't enough funding to investigate the crimes reported already and now this system is supposed to report even more crime at the price of my privacy.
I could see potentially a system where known suspects are targeted specifically but in this case, everybody is a suspect. What happened to presumption of innocence?
The fact of the matter is that chat control is the digital Stasi, always listening to your conversations, analyzing your messages. God forbid the algorithm flags your innocent picture wrongly.
You obviously did not follow the recent drama in the EU related to Chat Control V2.
The EU wants LEOs to have access to the contents of your messages/emails/metadata and keeps extending the Chat Control V1 law in order to not have to delete the data that it already has.
You may not be able to buy that data outright but it will be out there and collected by the messaging providers on behalf of the EU.
It even had a data retention law that forced providers to keep up to 8 years of data related to their customers so that it could be handed over to LEOs.
The EU's stance on privacy is just lipstick on a pig. When you pick under the curtain of the privacy laws in the EU, you'll see that it's not better here than in the US.
> You obviously did not follow the recent drama in the EU related to Chat Control V2.
It is strange to say they wanted it when we have proof it is voted down and widely unsupported. A part of the EU government apparatus wants it, but taking that and saying the EU wants it is not honest.
I have talked about it around me a bit and most people who do not work in tech or who don't have a certain interest in online privacy or privacy in general don't know about it.
Of course when you ask the citizens of the EU if they are cool about being monitored at all times by the EU LEOs then they don't want it but the commission wants it bad. All this is due from the heavy lobbying that has been happening in Brussels.
The worst part is that this is happening while the EU is saying that it wants data sovereignty, and wants to become less dependent on the software coming from the US, but it's ready to get in bed with a US company in order to deploy this mass surveillance system who supposedly is very good at finding CP.
Nevermind the fact that it means that every bit of online communication will be analyzed and dissected by a corporation that is out of reach of the EU.
But the commission is not stupid, they carved themselves a nice little clause so that they can be exempted from such mass surveillance. I guess they understand that having all telecommunications monitored by a for profit company that is not from the EU could lead to some embarrassing data leaks, just like we saw with AT&T but they don;t care if it's our data that leaks as long as it's not theirs.
That is why to me GDPR is just a facade. You can't seriously say that you are pro privacy and pro democracy if you keep trying to recreate the Stasi on a larger scale.
CP is just a pretext to keep records on everyone. Good thing everyone over 40 in Eastern Europe still remembers the Stasi and its sister secret police agencies that collected data on everyone and tortured political prisoners. I suspect that climate activists are the next likely candidates for an eventual repression apparatus, so better beware.
Portugal and Spain also aren't found of their politicians from 50 years ago (their regimes fell in 1974, and 1975, respectively). To add to your point.
How does it look on one hand to say that the EU cares about it's users data and wants the users to be able to choose who it is shared with, has clear guidelines related to it's storage and levy fines on companies who breach these terms and then turn around and come out with Chat Control V2?
Something does not compute. Either you are pro privacy and you act like it or you are not.
It kills me to hear that Europe is pro privacy, because it is not true. Not if you look under the veneer and start peeling back the layers.
These sorts of data breaches should be a wake up call for any state actors who are planning on collecting massive amounts of data on their citizens.
It should make them pause and say, you know maybe we should not just give away all our data to Russia or China if they manage to break in our system.
Maybe the best way to avoid such data breaches is to not store the data in the first place.
The US also has laws that, in isolation, would suggest some sort of protection against universal corporate/government surveillance, but they’re no more effective here than in the EU.
I am not sure if social proof is a dark pattern. If you use it to say, here, we already have x number of satisfied customers, what is possibly wrong with that?
I was/am skeptical also, but a quick Google search found this.
> Testimonials and user feedback usually display positive reviews and lack any negative experiences, or details on services or products. Furthermore, the online environment makes it difficult to differentiate between genuine and fake testimonials.
Yeah, but I'm with OP: lying is obviously a dark pattern in any marketing text, but that doesn't automatically make every type of text where companies can lie a dark pattern.
Testimonials in particular feel harmless to me. They've been used for centuries, they're obviously fluff but people understand that, and they don't attempt to coerce or trick you into making a decision, they're just giving you positive data points the same as any other marketing blurb. If you include testimonials I'm not sure how you can exclude any text at all.
I'd say that social proof is only a dark pattern if paired with another dark pattern (urgency, outright lying), in which case it's not really a dark pattern in its own right, is it?
I think it's fine as a marketing argument, like in the page where you present your product. As much as citing the big names already using it.
What isn't fine is when you try to book an hotel room and you get nagging messages saying that 2849 other people want to book the same room for the same dates. And of course when you try to unsubscribe and you need to pass through marketing material, with or without social proof.
That's not social proof, that's false urgency, which is its own pattern listed separately.
> Dark patterns involving urgency impose a real or fake temporal or quantitative limit on a deal to pressure
the consumer into making a purchase, thus exploiting the scarcity heuristic. Accordingly, such dark
patterns may also be referred to as scarcity cues or claims. Examples include low stock and high demand
messages or a countdown timer to indicate an expiring deal or discount.
As someone who has had to implement a lot of social proof components and ‘urgency messaging’ I’d guess part of it being down to the fact that, a lot of the time, the numbers are absolute trash. I had to do it so often I added a ‘randomNumberBetween’ function to the frontend library I made for one of my employers.
> I am not sure if social proof is a dark pattern.
It is when it’s faked¹ or biased² which happens mighty frequently. I’ve seen websites posted to HN which blatantly used AI profile pictures and AI generated text for the testimonials. That is the norm, not the exception.
¹ Not real people or testimonials.
² Only showing the 3 positive reviews out of 100 negative.
Ariane 6 is just pork barrel politics at this point.
Will it launch? sure! Will it deliver some payloads in orbit? Of course. Is it already completely obsolete and completely overpriced? That goes without saying!
They just took the wrong turn many years ago and they have decided that it was better to keep going than to admit that they made a mistake.
If we assume it takes the same amount of time to produce a working version of Ariane Next(the European falcon 9) then it won't arrive before the the mid 2030s and by this point, I would expect Starship or another rocket to have taken over the entire market anyway.
Finally, I want to say that the money that funds this is not magic money that appears out of thin air, it's taxes or debt that we are saddling the next generation with and it seems considering the debt levels in Europe that we should aim to be a tad bit more careful how we spend these budgets.
The performance numbers are fine, it's not obsolete in the sense of usefulness. Anyway, this project is not a French project or a German project but combination of many, therefore it needs to serve the interest of all those, therefore its politically very complex, therefore the management can't act as Musk.
If it flies and delivers stuff into the space, even at higher prices, its a huge success.
> If it flies and delivers stuff into the space, even at higher prices, its a huge success.
Why do people keep repeating this nonsense. The goals of the project were outlined in 2014 when the project was greenlit. If anybody back then had suggested that
'If it flies and delivers stuff into the space, even at higher prices, its a huge success.'
They would have been laughed out of the room. It directly contradicts the whole rational for the Ariane 6 that made it politically viable.
If what you say was true, then Europe would be flying the Ariane 5 ME and developing a reusable launch vehicle of the future right now.
You are just repeating ESA and Arianespace PR spin, when around 2020 it was clear their 2014 justification were nonsense, the just changed their PR and everybody just repeats it no matter that it directly contradicts the actual rational that was outlined for Ariane 6 in 2014.
What you failed to mention was that the rulings against data retention for example which were indeed invalidated by the European court happened 8 years after the fact.
So what do we do for 8 years while the courts decide which side is right?
The only reason Hungary is currently associated with the "Chat control" draft is because Hungary currently holds the EU presidency and as part of their mandate they are free to set goals and negotiate with other countries in order to come up with future laws.
First, these drafts mostly originate from the EU commission, so Hungary is not the one who came out with it in the first place. Secondly, Belgium which had the presidency a couple of months ago also tried (and failed) to get this draft across the line.
So yes, Hungary, which may or may not be on it's way to become a dictatorship is very happy to keep pushing for these negotiations to happen but let's also take a moment and remember that Sweden, France, Spain and many more countries are also happy with it.
So to me, the question is how can we take EU countries seriously when they talk about privacy when so many of them are ready to create a system of blanket surveillance on all their citizens?
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