alt Hacker NewsInteresting that this is the example they've used, as they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
However, I'm not sure how the abuses perpetrated by totalitarian regimes map to regulation such as GDPR, which primarily constrains private entities. Compared to their US counterparts, European governments are not all that more hesitant to use spyware, tap phones, etc. In the same vein, Flock doesn't hold a candle to pervasive camera-based surveillance in the UK.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US should have federal privacy legislation and there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the private sector today, but it's a bit more complicated than "GDPR is there to stop the Nazis". It probably fits better into the general culture of distrusting and regulating private enterprise (maybe for good reasons).
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Even today different German agencies or public institutions are not linked. If you marry, or get driver's license, you have to fill all kinds of forms, maybe get a birth certificate etc, because they can't just ask a different office to give it to them.
As you said, this is so nobody in government can collect all kinds of data about citizens, to do bad things to them.
Some people would like to have, say, a public wealth register today, and the above is exactly why others heavily oppose those ideas.
Good observation and I agree that the German situation is more nuanced, even if it’s not perceived as such.
GP’s argument applies to the design of German state bureaucracy. E.g there exist no unified German identification number but several for different purposes (tax, pension etc.). This is directly motivated from the Nazi regime as GP told us. That’s also why the Stasi is not often cited as an argument because the GDR developed in parallel with the West German state.
I would say that these precautions are not enough to prevent a 21st century authoritarian regime from rising and using data. Most of the interesting data is in the hand of privatized public places (social media). We can see these issues already happening with ICE in the US
> they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
The Stasi were low-tech card catalogs and blackmail.
The Nazis used IBM, and digitized census data that had already been collected and was just there to be used.* Places without extensive census data are where Jews survived. Plenty of people didn't even know they were "Jewish" until the Nazis told them.
It absolutely maps to GDPR. I bet that if you pulled a few good sources of private data, you could map every single e.g. homosexual in the US, with few false positives or negatives. This could still happen if we passed a privacy law tomorrow, and only used data collected until today.
The odds are very much non-zero that this will happen. It should be illegal to collect and trade in massive collections of dossiers on US citizens. The government can just buy them. Weird how we could see it as bad when it was anti-Chinese propaganda about "social credit," but Americans don't know that it's illegal in just about every country in the world to collect and make decisions based on dragnet "credit ratings" like we do here.
The problem with GDPR is that Europeans don't control anything; and they don't really make rights, they make guidelines that they call "rights" but that they can break whenever they want or whenever they want to buy American. GDPR is just a restraint on Europeans, nobody else has to care, and European companies and governments can just buy the info they want about their own populations from Americans who will be happy to sell it to them.
I view it as another facet of policy.
If corporations (public or private) have data the government wants, then the government gets it. This can even be used as a way to circumvent tighter regulations on the government; see Flock for an example.
Secondly, it's the corporations that are paving the way here. Yeah, governments are obviously capable of designing and producing their own tech, but if the corporations have already made it? Than it's so much easier for the government to use it.