The EU has no special forces, spy agencies, or army. Let alone a large one. Yes: the EU's member states have armies. But so do the member states of the CERN cooperation. That doesn't mean it's a particle accelerator with an air force.

Nor does the EU have any impact on criminal law, so you won't be arrested for anything anytime soon.

It is also a myth that EU enforcement of privacy rights (or antitrust laws) is used for protectionism. The number and sums of fines levied on companies from the EU/US/Asia, for example, closely track each country/regions economic activity in the EU. If anything, EU and Asian companies are hit more often than their US counterparts–possibly because the US actually has rather high standards for corporate governance.

> A further point relates to the problem that once states gain such control of how any company deals with data it is not gone be long before all companies are legally required to give standard access to all this data

Stuff like this is purely conspiratorial. And it doesn't even make sense: If there's a "you must share user data with the government"-law in the making, how do privacy rules make it easier to pass today than at any point in the past? With privacy coming up in the news any time the EU picks a fight with one of these companies, it seems as if their actions would only serve to educate the public about the value of privacy. And would such rules not actually lessen the value of the data amassed by companies, making it less useful to gain access?

> a view already expressed by many, many politicians

Hi there, Mr. President!

While its correct that the EU does not have these things, even if they want to have them. The agreements for information exchange and other programs alonge these lines do get negotiated above the state-to-state level and the EU is absolutly involved.

Second, privacy laws that pass on the EU level are required to be implemented by memeber states.

Preventative saving of connection metadate is an example where germany had to pay fines to the EU because they did not comply (I can give more resources if you want). This caused the issue to come back again and again in Germany because compliance with EU level rules is a major political goal of many parties.

So yes, the EU is not yet as powerful as I made out. But the agreements between the member state make compliance to a common framework far more likely.

> It is also a myth that EU enforcement of privacy rights (or antitrust laws) is used for protectionism.

Your arguments don't confine me. Just because the EU also goes after its own cooperation very often as well, does not mean that all of these actions have the same motivation.

You can go and read in detail about how large media groups tried to use EU regulation against google, specifically google indexing of their results. They advanced HIGHLY privacy threading solutions and a large number of politicians go on board of of the anti-google train.

This is well documented in the German hacker community, there are lots of talks, podcast, write ups about this and other issues like it.

Now you can argue that the politicians were just good willed Samaritans but if you choice to believe that we don't really have to argue anymore.

> Stuff like this is purely conspiratorial. And it doesn't even make sense: If there's a "you must share user data with the government"-law in the making, how do privacy rules make it easier to pass today than at any point in the past?

You think regulation of internal company data usage of a foreign cooperation does not serve as precedence for further regulation about usage and law applying to that exact same data?

Again, this sort of things have been document again and again. The government starts collecting data for one reason, promising it will not be used for other things. Once it is established and the data exists, political pressure mounts because everybody wants it.

If the EU/France government has exact information and monitoring ability of all Facebook internal data movement, it will make it far more likely that will go further. That is simply public choice theory. Also, again, there are lots of examples, this is exactly what happened with the Maut system in Germany.

> With privacy coming up in the news any time the EU picks a fight with one of these companies, it seems as if their actions would only serve to educate the public about the value of privacy. And would such rules not actually lessen the value of the data amassed by companies, making it less useful to gain access?

The value lots is a far, far less then what you assume. These news are bigger in our bubble, most people in most of Europe know absolutely nothing about these data regulations and they don't know that France is trying to do anything. Even if they did, it would have no impact on the profit of google or Facebook. They have been in the news about these issues over and over again and there is absolutely no long term impact on their stock prices.

tl:dr; There are examples of all these mechanism in the EU and between the EU and members

Initially you seemed to be objecting to the EU's privacy actions against private companies such as Facebook, based on what appeared to be the idea that it's hypocritical for the EU to do so while invading privacy themselves. You also suggested that EU privacy rules are drawn as part of a strategy to make it easier to get access to such data themselves.

I still fail to see any mechanism for these arguments to work: It's perfectly possible that the EU takes a hard line of private company's use of data with purely good intentions, while not living up to those standards themselves. That is, in fact, what Occam's Razor would suggest, considering we all see our use of user data as benign, at least in comparison to others'.

I still disagree with the idea that the EU itself is a bad actor with regards to private data. Conflating legislation in member states in your criticism only serves Anti-EU populism, when the EU has in reality been a force for citizens' right across the continent.

To use your own example: the EU's Data Retention Directive was actually invalidated by the European Court of Justice in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive. In the course of that case, it also established "that general and blanket data retention is no longer possible".

This has a lasting effect on efforts in member states to create their own data retention laws. Quote: In a television interview, the EU Advocate General Pedro Cruz Villalón highlighted the risk that the retained data might be used illegally in ways that are "potentially detrimental to privacy or, more broadly, fraudulent or even malicious".

As to the second point, namely that action on private data collection somehow makes it easier for governments to access such data, you fail to give a mechanism for this process, as well.

Yes, the toll-road example shows that any collection of data will sooner or later attract the attention of, for example, law enforcement. But how does action against WhatsApp/Facebook make any efforts to access WhatsApp/Facebook data easier? Everyone already knows that Facebook's data is incredibly valuable for law enforcement, yet also sensitive. Law enforcement agencies have for years accessed that data via court orders.

Toll Collect happens to be a great example showing that the best way to keep law enforcements' grubby hands off our data is to never collect such data in the first place. That's something called "data minimisation", and it's the cornerstone of the EU's privacy directive, and also at the heart of this WhatsApp/FB action.

Also there is ongoing effort to make many of these laws standard for the whole EU. For example, the saving of all phone and internet metadate for multible month is now mandetory for all EU states.

In germany the suprme court shut the initiative down and germany had to pay fines to the EU. Last I remembered this idea has come back in germany and all the fight german hackers (CCC) and co have put up did not work.

There is a large number of things here, and many have long lectures add Chaos Communication Congress during the last 10 years.