To head off people's facile comments, I will just quote the first two paragraphs of the article, and then ask what part of it seems objectionable.
> Italy's data protection authority is asking Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek for formal responses on how it handles Italians' data when they use its AI chatbot app.
> The authority known as the Garante on Tuesday said it sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China.
Unfortunately, while more accurate, a headline like “data protection arm of Italian gov sends polite disclosure requests to DeepSeek, as per their purview” isn’t very dramatic :)
Considering EU is so far behind on AI and tech as a whole, I hope they see this an opportunity to develop something of their own with better data privacy or whatever suits their boat(I don't know how though). I am really rooting for EU and their economy to bounce back. The world desperately needs a balance from all sides.
If anything, this revealed they aren’t actually that much behind. It’s just that the US’ lead is completely inflated and that the business models they dreamt of were finicky at best.
This is a bit of a myth, most countries in Europe have better social mobility then the US, where people of different social classes are quite segregated. (Though as always, there is a lot of variation between countries.)
This is such a weird stereotype. The US was declared in 1776. Obviously it has generational wealth. Unless you think everybody lives to be 300 years old.
The "lords" in US (not all, but the great majority) are self-made and in the process of making themselves they created significantly more value for the society, which ended up benefitting most of us.
The titles in EU are inherited or bought with inherited money.
Actually my idea of Europe is based on living in it (Eastern side, to be precise) and building and running startups here.
My idea of US is based on living and working there (a while ago though) and (for the last 20+ years) watching powerlessly how more and more of the products and services I interact with and use every day are designed there (and often build in China) while the EU is becoming less and less relevant.
One singular anecdote doesn’t say much about the overall state of things. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would claim in present day that Donald Trump became wealthy without receiving significant financial help/inheritance from his family.Of course there will be some people who are rich due to the wealth they inherited from their parents, that number will not be zero anywhere.
There are multiple studies on this, but they all seem to converge on the number of around 80% of current millionaires in the US being first generation/self-made[0]. That is, the ones who didn’t receive an inheritance from their parents or other family members.
It also shows some other interesting stats, such as “only 8% of those in the study attended prestigious private schools, with 62% attending state schools.”
This is the Italian data protection authority acting on a report from an Italian consumer group. The EU doesn't seem involved in this particular inquiry.
sure because that is how the gdpr is implemented with national enforcement but they still have to submit draft decisions to the gdpr cooperation mechanism and get consensus and the EDPB gets final say. it is very much an EU/EEA process
US websites have been quite successful in fearmongering about it - either "oh no, the EU forced us to put this mess of annoying popups on our page" or "oh no, the EU forced us to block our own website from it"
I'll try and spin it a different way -- What if the US and China had been unfairly taking advantage of their lax rules to bring innovation to the damage of their (and other countries') citizens, much like China has been unfairly exploiting its own lower standards of living and personal freedom to gain advantage in terms of manufacturing power against the US and Europe?
Europe has no competitors to the US/Chinese tech giants and their citizens want to use technology like anybody else without a layer of bureaucracy preventing them from doing basic stuff.
I don't think European citizens have been forced to use Uber, Airbnb, Apple, Android, Facebook , WhatsApp and so on.
The main food deliverers (Uber Eats clones) here are Dutch and Swedish. The place you can find someone's apartment to stay in temporarily is German. The Fediverse was invented here, in Germany. Ride-sharing companies are Estonian, German, and some others I don't remember.
There are no companies that rise meteorically, capture billions of users and then collapse if they can't monetize. There are just companies that quietly provide products and services users want. If that's considered a failure to you, then... okay? Signal is American, but Telegram is Russian. And you can just, you know, send a text message, without involving any third party (but both your phone companies can see it).
You conveniently left our everything else I mention and those companies aren't really leading. Bolt for example has an edge because everywhere in Europe they're been killing Uber or limiting it hardly, and in some countries it's still the case.
In most cases those companies are knockoffs of American companies and you've yet to mention cases were Europe is actually leading the way (aside from some unique cases it doesn't happen regularly)
P.s. Russia is not part of Europe, you can safely leave it out (and yes they've plenty of competitors to american companies telegram, Yandex, VK etc. we can't say the same for Europe)
If you're arguing that Europe killed Uber by making it follow common-sense regulations, you could just ask well argue that the USA killed Bolt by not.
Europeans simply do not see why they should try to "innovate" the American way: creating products that no one actually needs, and trying to get people to buy them anyway, often by killing the alternatives, which often results in more work, lower wages and higher prices for everyone. Europeans (other than AfD voters) would rather have a good enough society that stays good enough and doesn't decay.
It's not common sense regulation. It's anticompetitive regulations. You're happy to ride a taxi that often times takes a longer route to steal you a few extra euro? Are you happy that a taxi driver earn 500-600-700 euro a day when the avg salary in some EU countries is 1.5k a month? Are you happy that they don't take credit card payments and accept (often time) only cash? Are you happy that they evade taxes? Are you happy to go inside a car and don't know how long and how much your ride is going to cost? Are you happy that often times in touristic cities they refuse to use the meter?
You seem to know well what Europeans want but I bet you never got scammed by a taxi driver. Europeans like everybody want to simply pay less by having an open market that allows the best players to offer services without artificially inflating the price because that specific category some privilege.
If you claiming that Europe is not decaying probably you're living in the wrong Europe.
You seem to be listing a bunch of things that are illegal in Europe. Yes, that was my point. Do you want to suffer from all these things that are legal in the USA and not in Europe?
That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities…
It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang.
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The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead.
What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
I was talking "fairness" from the point of view of the EU in this case, and it is the exact sense that you are delineating in your addendum at the end of the comment.
It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
Ironic. The "right to express discontent against the government" seems to be being curtailed in the UK, and all of London is under CCTV surveillance, so maybe the EU should label its exports "unfair" as well?
And in any case, if your citizens fought for rights for themselves, and won those rights in their own country from their own government, why does that mean it is "unfair" that others in other countries leverage their lack of such rights or privileges for an advantage? Perhaps it is much MORE "unfair" that you are trying to impose your own framework and guarantees on others, who may not have the same per-capita wealth, or the same cultural values!
For example, the "third world" is complaining that you "first world people" cut down all your trees over centuries, used a lot of fossil fuels and built up your economies, and now you've put in place standards that you expect them to follow, so they can't build up their own economies. You want Brazil to preserve its rainforest, but you didn't preserve your own forests. This concept of "unfair" that you're espousing is quite dubious and hypocritical!
If you don't think it's a good thing to recognize your own mistakes and try to warn others about them, then I don't think I have anything else to discuss.
Okay, you cut down all the forests in your country, and you "recognized your mistake", and try to warn others about them.
But you don't just try to warn, you try to impose rules on them which pull up the ladder behind you. It's like the big cartels of corporations that lobby the government for licenses and regulations, because they "recognized the mistakes" that can happen in an unregulated environment which allowed them to grow so quickly, and lo and behold, it becomes far more costly for anyone to disrupt them.
How convenient. Something might be a "good thing" but not an "unmitigated good". You can wax poetic cherrypicking only your good motives, but it turns out that your rhetoric also hides ulterior motives. Well, if we don't have anything to discuss, I guess you won't answer me on that point.
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Or somewhat similar: When the USA bombed Laos, we were doing them and Vietnam a favor of course, because we recognized the mistakes of Communism and didn't want them to become Communist. Because the "Domino Theory" stated that allowing communism to spread would make mankind more miserable. So we had to nip it in the bud, even if it meant killing a lot of people. Same in South America etc. In this case, we hadn't even "realized the mistakes", but we were so sure we didn't want others to have a different economic system, that we were willing to kill them to prevent it.
Btw, they resisted, we withdrew, and to this day Vietnam has a Communist government, and is relatively prosperous. But in Cuba and North Korea we still keep crippling sanctions on them, to "prove" that their system is harming their people. Even if Cuba presents zero threat to us, we will continue total sanctions on the entire country. And we will welcome Cuban refugees with open arms, while refugees from Colombia etc are turned back, because the former can spread the word about what a terrible system they have in Cuba.
We can export the costs of our war on drugs, our industrial waste, etc. to Mexico and other countries, and "fairness" somehow is not mentioned. Anglophone countries can occupy India for centuries, cause famines and repress opportunities, but then say it's "unfair" that Indians with H1B visas are taking our jobs for lower wages. European empires could establish protectorates and extract resources, and then lament about the "immigrants" from those territories polluting their culture. There is no "fairness" in geopolitics, is my point. At bottom it's all self-interest and hypocrisy, dressed up in crude attempts at some kind of moralizing language that any decently-informed person would have massive cognitive dissonance swallowing.
Many people who blame Putin for annexing Crimea would then applaud Trump for annexing Canada or Greenland. They'd look past USA's invasions and occupations halfway around the world as "mistakes were made", but hyperfocus on another country's invasions of a neighbor or putting pressure on their neighbor. All I can say is, don't have a double standard. Every superpower pressures their neighbors, but since the 50s, only one country goes halfway around the world to bomb, invade and occupy faraway countries that present zero threat to it. And the government of that country is also the one moralizing to everyone else to stop doing what they're doing. So yeah, I take the moral arguments with a massive grain of salt.
It's unfair that in your country you decide nobody should have to work more than a certain amount, and then you make other people work more than that amount in a different country instead, yes.
So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum?
Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
How about if we have two farmers with similar patches of land, one works it exactly to his needs, consuming everything he produces. The other one works as hard as he can, weekends included, with the surplus irrigating and buying tools and more land that make him extra productive, such as 10 years down the road he has amassed significant wealth while his neighbor is still living from harvest to harvest.
Because Capitalism is not a school, it's real life. In real life the more, harder and smarter you work - the more you get (generally). And the more you have - the more you can leverage that to make even more. And in the process the society and everybody else gains even more since you only capture a small slice of the value you produce.
It's the beautiful process that got us out of abject poverty (literal mud) to the amazing luxury we are enjoying today.
What's unfair is to rule that "this is all I am willing to work and nobody else is allowed to work more". And countries dumb enough to self-own themselves like that will quickly be leapfrogged by smarter countries willing to work harder, longer and smarter.
Because the real world doesn't care about your ideology, it only cares about results. And communism has always failed miserably, everywhere it was tried.
While companies will always follow the path of least resistance and prefer as little regulation as possible to make money without a lot of headaches, most people will prefer their privacy be respected and their data not sold-off without their approval or used in undocumented ways, even if it leads to less innovation in the corporate landscape.
But the number of incidents with head injuries is increasing because more (elderly) people are riding e-bikes for longer than they would have a normal bike.
As reaction times slow with age this is not a great combo with a faster bike which is a cause to more incidents.
There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this
Regulation is only a small part of the story. Keep in mind that GDPR was implemented in 2018, long after Europe lost the tech battle.
The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments.
Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.
That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership.
On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers.
Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation.
If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding.
Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
4. have a system for tracking every single dataset you have lying around including ones that might just be for experiments and in a different format and purge people who have requested to be forgotten or be fined 10s of thousands of dollars
5. frequent new legal interpretations that become the basis of enforcement and then you have to rearchitect the whole way you were handling data
always good to impose onerous rules on R&D when you are critically losing the R&D and capital race
4. If it is personal data, you have to know where they came from, where they are stored and why. If you don't want to do that, then invest the minimal effort it takes to anonymize them during ingestion and then you can do whatever you want with them.
5. Now that is just false, or you have some really bad architects, if you are so sensitive to new legal interpretation (which there haven't been any significant ones)
Why does everything needs to be pro EU or anti EU. Yes, consumer privacy is more protected in EU. And yes it has directly caused EU R&D budget to become significantly smaller. And yes it has led to ad revenue decrease and created more problem for small companies who can't use non targeted ad.
If you are arguing against any of these, for which there are lot of data I think you are not up for discussion.
Where is the GP taking a pro-EU or anti-EU stance? Where are they arguing against "ad revenue decrease" which "created more problem for small companies", or the impact of GDPR on the EU R&D budget?
1. all text data is personal data so yeah you can’t anonymize it, you need to have. a central metadata tracking of all datasets - this is a more challenging problem than it appears from on high.
2. i don’t see how you can look at, for instance, random EU jurisdictions not allowing Google Fonts on your website due to GDPR ( but only some jurisdictions and only years after the law was passed) and see that as inconsistent and moving target enforcement - and that is just one well known example of many many many
But thing is, PII is not "live ammo". Artificially designating it so simply raises the cost of working with it. Doing that designation through an amazingly dumb law just makes EU Internet startups unfeasible. Meanwhile, US and Chinese startups flourish since they don't have this limitation.
I worked for a number of American companies, not beholden to also serve EU markers. They still did not demonstrate any cavalier attitudes towards PII though. Nobody wants to be the subject of some data leak front-page story.
Of course not, but there is a huge difference between market-demanded standards and quality and government-mandated ones. In more ways than one: cost, difficulty of implementation, UX, etc.
A real, practical example is that US web startups do not have to annoy their US users with cookie banners for simply using Google Analytics on their website - like the EU ones must. Underneath, the implementation and PII data protections are exactly the same, but the UX is night and day.
Yes. You should have a system for tracking every single dataset containing personal data: that data does not belong to you. You are just its steward.
You should have had such a system even before GDPR came into existence, but after it did? Your organization's lack of organization is not the legislator's problem.
It sounds like 95% of shops - of shops you know well enough to have an opinion about - should get their shit together, then. Why should people tolerate their sloppiness?
GDP hasn't been a good metric for a good 50 years now. It's good when your country burns coals and shits out steel, not much more. High gdp for sure, higher salaries for sure, everything needed to survive is twice as expensive and you have 0 social safety net.
Meanwhile in the US
- mortgage are above 7%, twice as high as in Europe
- min wage is bellow the Polish min wage, half the German min wage
- life expectancy is going down, 4 years under the EU 27 average, 6 years less than France
1. EU barely has 30 year fixed rates - of course rates will be higher for a much riskier loan to counterparty.
2. Yes true, the minimum wage in Poland is 13 cents higher than the US. Fewer than 1% of US income earners are paid the federal minimum wage. In Poland, ~15% of income earners are paid the minimum wage.
3. Yes our life expectancy is bad - although better when you do demographic control, we have a problem with obesity and easy access to guns causing suicide.
4-6. sorry but relative wealth measures are not effective for deciding how affluent a society is. our ‘pensioners’ in poverty are only in poverty relative to the very high median earnings in the US. They could take their money to the EU and spend better than many of those other retirees.
1. Yes, we are quite literally defending you while doing those things right now.
2. Trump has bad policies yes, although I hadn’t heard anything about an actual military takeover of Greenland.
3. It’s not as if EU doesn’t have tariffs on the Us already, for instance you all are very protective of the auto industry as well as your domestic farmers, just to name a few. I think tariffs are bad policy on both sides of the atlantic
Also even if you sent 100% of the money collected through tariffs back to the EU through Ukraine, what's the point we're back to square one with extra steps in the middle... The US are serving their own interests, it's totally fine, you don't have to pretend they're sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity.
Also, the literal advertisement tagline for Apple, one of the wealthiest company in the world, is about how their product "preserve privacy"... so I doubt that privacy is wealth-destroying
yah, so the compacting machines wouldn't pop into half-full bottles all the time yuck. and now the caps are connected to the bottle. which is a Good Thing (TM)
> Italy's data protection authority is asking Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek for formal responses on how it handles Italians' data when they use its AI chatbot app.
> The authority known as the Garante on Tuesday said it sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China.