[HN Gopher] US expected to publish Privacy Shield executive orde...
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US expected to publish Privacy Shield executive order next week
Author : elashri
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-09-30 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.eu)
| angrycontrarian wrote:
| Will this cancel out the other executive order, mandating that
| the government track my online purchases?
| haswell wrote:
| Which executive order is this?
| angrycontrarian wrote:
| Looks like all financial transactions in general, not
| necessarily online ones:
|
| https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2021/10/09/wh.
| ..
| haswell wrote:
| > _The idea is to require banks, credit unions and other
| providers of financial services to track and submit
| information to the IRS about the total inflows and outflows
| of every account_
|
| > _The IRS wouldn 't receive details on individual
| transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals._
|
| This seems quite different than "tracking purchases",
| online or not. As far as I can tell, they're looking to
| identify movement of money between accounts that would
| indicate behavior meant to skirt taxes.
|
| I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of
| individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to
| characterize this as "tracking purchases".
|
| Did this ever actually go into effect? Looks like this was
| all just a proposal at the time the article was written.
| Test0129 wrote:
| Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point
|
| > Reports submitted by banks to the IRS would break down
| the numbers to include physical-cash transactions per
| account, any transactions with a foreign account and
| transactions between accounts held by the same owner. The
| IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions
| but, rather, gross yearly totals.
|
| This _implies_ tracking of purchases. In particular, a
| half-awake person will use cash to make transactions they
| don 't want someone to know about. It doesn't take much
| digging to correlate a cash transaction to something if
| you know a few more details.
|
| At any rate:
|
| > I'm never excited about moves that involve more
| tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair
| to characterize this as "tracking purchases".
|
| It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised
| as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it.
| Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to
| distract you from yet another incursion into our right to
| privacy.
| shuntress wrote:
| What do you mean by a "half-awake person"?
|
| Also, cash purchases do not interact in any way with your
| bank account so I still do not see how this is tracking
| purchases.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It doesn't "imply" tracking transactions rather
| specifically says they aren't going to track
| transactions. From your own quote:
|
| > _The IRS wouldn 't receive details on individual
| transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals._
|
| The banks will just have to provide a total account
| breakdown, e.g.:
|
| John Doe 2022 - Account 1 Report: $10,000 to foreign
| banks, $6,000 received in cash, $3,000 sent to John Doe
| Account 2.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your
| point_
|
| How so? The quote you just pasted includes what I already
| quoted - specifically that the IRS does not receive
| details on individual transactions. Here's another
| article that explores this and the common
| misrepresentation of the proposal as well [0].
|
| Your bank already tracks your purchases. They must do so
| to know how much money you have now, and how much you'll
| have after you make a purchase. That would not change.
| They also cannot see what you do with your cash - that
| will also not change.
|
| The thing that seems new (and again, still _potentially_
| concerning, but also potentially reasonable), is that
| gross totals will be shared.
|
| > _It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it 's
| disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they
| know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to
| do to distract you from yet another incursion into our
| right to privacy._
|
| Given two scenarios, one in which a full list of your
| individual transactions are sent to the IRS, and one in
| which aggregate inflow/outflow data is provided to the
| IRS, are you really arguing that these are the same, or
| that distinguishing between them is splitting hairs?
| Another framing would be that this is looking for an
| accurate representation of what's actually going on.
|
| How would you distinguish some hypothetical future policy
| that involves _actually_ tracking /sending individual
| purchases from this one that does not do such a thing?
|
| But this all feels like a conversation of dubious value
| since we're discussing an article that talks about a
| proposal that hadn't yet been finalized at the time of
| writing.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't things to ask questions about
| there, but I am saying that getting the details right
| matters.
|
| - [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/
| 09/29/fac...
| EnKopVand wrote:
| I spent a decade working with digitalisation in the public sector
| in Denmark and I doubt this will change a thing considering a
| executive order is too risky to rely on.
|
| I'm a little torn on the issue because I value privacy, but
| currently we have a nice scandal going here in my country, which
| is essentially the former top intelligence boss of the military
| secret police, or whatever you'd call it in English, being
| accused of leaking state secrets. What he leaked was that our
| government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not
| like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own
| governments let the Americans have free access to our data any
| way.
|
| While the bureaucrats and lawyers discuss this, both the public
| and private sector suffers the financial consequences. We
| recently had a smaller scandal, where a town was told they
| couldn't use their chromebooks, or their google education setup,
| for this years schooling. Essentially making it impossible for
| that city to teach, because so much of their setup relied on
| google education and they only had a month to find an
| alternative. You can argue privacy over this, but it's sort of
| weird that one city, out of 30+ cities, were banned from using
| these tools while the others weren't, and that they were banned
| from it because they fucked up their documentation. I'm not going
| to defend google, but really, in this case we're hurting the
| education of thousands of children over something silly. Because
| the alternative to google education isn't going to be Linux and
| some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn't
| exist, it's going to be Microsoft and the exact same data
| siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world
| issue.
|
| There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they
| are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they are a
| safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In
| Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in
| a worse alternative?
|
| I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what
| I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have
| worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since
| they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it's done in
| secret. But an executive order isn't really going to help us,
| because who knows what the next American government might do to
| it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure
| strategy on american politics anymore.
| jacooper wrote:
| > I'm not going to defend google, but really, in this case
| we're hurting the education of thousands of children over
| something silly. Because the alternative to google education
| isn't going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative,
| because that simply doesn't exist, it's going to be Microsoft
| and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a
| small part of the real world issue.
|
| Nextcloud exists, and it can serve a school just fine.
|
| In fact The EU is partnering with NextCloud to get rid of
| Office 365(1)
|
| Nextcloud is not fully there yet, but the only way to push it
| to compete is to support local alternatives by giving them an
| advantage.
|
| Even though I still think Nextcloud is being held back by
| technical decisions(PHP and its slowness and
|
| It feeling janky)
|
| > There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while
| they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they
| are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure?
| In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you,
| or in a worse alternative?
|
| OVH is literally the fifth biggest internet hosting provider,
| and Hetzner is 6th according W3techs(2)
|
| > I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading
| what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should
| have worked on giving us some European options first.
| Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even
| though it's done in secret. But an executive order isn't really
| going to help us, because who knows what the next American
| government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet
| their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.
|
| This is a specific case to Denmark, when looking at Europe in
| general the legal requirement (and some times bans) of Google
| analytics created GDPR friendly alternatives like Plausible.io
| and Posthog.
|
| And you can see the same thing with Nextcloud or EU hosting and
| many other things.
|
| Things take time, and result are starting to show up.
|
| 2. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/data_center
|
| 1. https://nextcloud.com/blog/european-governments-work-with-
| ne...
| [deleted]
| aborsy wrote:
| nextcloud leaves plenty to be desired even for home use.
| Slow, bloated, buggy, etc.
|
| And at the end it's just access to the files, that a samba
| share does too, with native OS applications.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our
| citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws
| actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans
| have free access to our data any way.
|
| Yeah :/ Unless I hear otherwise, I'm assuming this order has
| little to offer individuals and is instead a big business &
| government treaty. Governments (including our European ones)
| keeps their mass surveillance and American mega-corporations
| get the business contracts, all covered in PR of increased
| individual privacy.
|
| Since it's an executive order, it also wouldn't surprise me if
| there's a hidden payload relating to increased US surveillance
| due to the war. I may sound cynical but every leak about the
| intelligence apparatus has proven even me naive.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| An Executive Order is not good enough, frankly. The US needs
| _real_ legislative change in order to be considered adequate
| under EU human rights law.
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