There are e2ee chats. There are some parties/politicians who want to get rid of them, but so far they are proposals. If/when these things go beyond committee stage, politics and democracy need to do their job and be sensible.

PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.

Isn't that just the recent highly controversial Chat Control push? Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.

The US, at least in spirit is all about individual freedom, including freedom of being an asshole, and also the freedom of punching that asshole in the face, metaphorically speaking.

Europe values freedom too, but not as much as making sure people are not assholes. So, freedom of being an asshole is not a thing in Europe, and the government does the punching in the face so that you don't have to.

Which is best is honestly debatable. It is the usual question about the individual vs the collective. The US is on the individualist side, East Asia is on the collective side, Europe is somewhere in the middle.

I can't think of any e2ee app that's banned in the EU. I know Signal and WhatsApp are not.

Also you can get to jail for making fun of politicians where saying the same thing would be free speech in the US.

You have a very distorted perception of the state of privacy rights in Europe.

I don't think it's a paradox because the EU is not a single actor. Just like any government, they do some good and some bad things.

Those two examples are not opposite. They're both examples of governments crippling freedom.

The main reason that governments forcing USB-C is widely seen as good is because it limits the freedom of big corporations, which don't elicit much sympathy, but the principle is the same.

What? I I’m in Europe and I use e2ee daily. The reason you hear about this imho is that we have strong protections and you hear when someone tries to break them.

dude, yes some countries in the EU are "trying" to include backdoors, and e2ee chats are not going away. Meanwhile in the US, you have literally cameras watching everywhere you move, snitching to the police and Palantir and probably all the other 3 letter institutions, and you complain about privacy rights in the EU? With so many other stuff you could have pointed out? lol, rofl even

The much maligned GDPR gives stronger privacy rights than anything the US has

> Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.

?

You just made that up.

I'm sorry, but you should really read up about the laws in the US and in Europe. U laws are a lot more easy on spying agencies and spyware companies like Google and Facebook than European laws. Backdoors: ask the CIA about random number generators. Surveillance: heard of the cloud act?

>universal usb-c adoption

Literally brain dead to not support this

Couldn’t have picked a worse example

Dude you need to talk to real people and not just get all your information from right wing internet sites. You sound ridiculous. You think signal and PGP don't exist in Europe? You actually believe Europe is a surveillance state? Fucking hell dude, quit you job and go travel. Meet some real people from outside of America.

In EU, it's politician > industrialist >>> EU citizen > outsiders.

It's almost never only about consumers. Via tech regulations, they protect European incumbents first in effect. They see US is ahead and make laws to destroy their moats. If Apple was in EU, you wouldn't have saw universal usb-c, because it would have hurt an EU company. But the more you look at how tedious is for a non-EU company to sell to EU customers, the exemptions they don't get, the specialists fees they got to put on the table, you'll see EU is more coherently described as protectionist than pro-consumer.