It would be great if the US (and Chinese) governments didn’t act in this way (I’m sure the EU would act in the same way if they had tech companies) but it seems to be their nature.
No, the problem is that the US has specific laws that allows the government to require companies to secretly violate privacy, and punish them if they refuse, or even for just disclosing that the request was made.
The administrations of china and the USA are different of course, but not so different. The big difference is in the institutions and norms.
Transferring the private data of EU citizens to China or Russia would also be a major crime.
> The big difference is in the institutions and norms.
In theory yes; however the US has a strong norm of following the letter of the law, so what the letter of the US law says is important.
There will be no consequences whatsoever to anyone involved. The laws are for you to obey and for them to prosecute you, not the other way around.
But I'm curious if you explicitly believe that EU/EEA member countries unilaterally _don't_ spy on their citizens. Because I'd be inclined to say that's unlikely (at best) given what we know about the nature of intelligence organizations, namely that they're basically data lake vacuums in the 21st century.
The US has laws that give them the legal right to snoop on any data about EU (avd other foreign) citizens.
Those laws make it impossible to follow EU privacy laws as a US company.
One of the two have to give, and the US should make exceptions for EU citizens, or rescind the CLOUD act.
It's frustrating how many people are stuck in this loop, where they think any company can "easily" follow GDPR by just swapping data regions with their cloud provider. It's not that simple and never was.
This is a broader political spat between two of the largest government bodies in the world, not about facebook.
The EU is not the global privacy champion everyone makes them out to be. They just don't like that US companies can access EU citizens data specifically (since most of the internet is run by US companies). Whether they're okay snooping on their own citizens themselves is a separate issue--they've also regularly challenged encryption domestically.
I'm also certain the EU is not upset that certain 3 letter agencies in the US have access to Russian's private data when in the context of the war in the Ukraine. Like all governments, the EU only cares about their own interests, not about the philosophical idea of privacy in general.
Not with US laws. The whole problem are US laws essentially allowing government to force any company to disclose whatever they need with little reason. That's the problem. That the moment data are processed by US company (not even neccesarily in US), US government have right to violate privacy