I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is
fundamentally more privacy-friendly than the US, in black-letter terms?
US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limited research I've done suggest to me that that's true of virtually all western democracies, and that the loopholes in other countries can be even larger and less transparent. My impression of France for instance, is that there isn't a major distinction between what the French government can do on its own soil to combat terrorism versus what it can do abroad; that's probably not true of the US.
I'm interested in facts and non-emotional analysis; the "interesting" discussion we can have about this topic. Obviously a lot of people bring priors to it about the evils of the NSA or NSA/USG's corrupting influence on other countries. I'm prepared to stipulate that (believe it or not, I'm not that far from most HN readers on these topics, ideologically!) if we can boil things down to the raw facts.
US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limited research I've done suggest to me that that's true of virtually all western democracies, and that the loopholes in other countries can be even larger and less transparent. My impression of France for instance, is that there isn't a major distinction between what the French government can do on its own soil to combat terrorism versus what it can do abroad; that's probably not true of the US.
I'm interested in facts and non-emotional analysis; the "interesting" discussion we can have about this topic. Obviously a lot of people bring priors to it about the evils of the NSA or NSA/USG's corrupting influence on other countries. I'm prepared to stipulate that (believe it or not, I'm not that far from most HN readers on these topics, ideologically!) if we can boil things down to the raw facts.