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Comment by melbourne_mat | Hacker News Reader

"the party line"? That sort of emotive language sounds like something from Fox News or Heritage Foundation.

A small number of huge American tech companies have most to lose on this. These are the ones who play fast and loose with people's privacy.

If these new laws change the focus of business investment in Europe to those who respect privacy, that's a big win for all European citizens.

Now it's time for Margrethe Vestager to start cutting those huge American tech monopolies down to size!

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That's not just emotive language, it's insulting and degrading. The GDPR is a multi-party, supranational, democratically legitimized regulation. Also, I haven't seen a single PR campaign about the GDPR, and I'm from "over there". The grandparent is not arguing objectively nor purely based on facts.

Huh? It’s not meant to be insulting, nor could I find any reference in any culture in which it would be considered an insult. It simply means that all of you from the EU seem to say the same things about GDPR - that it’s wonderful, has no downsides, that our new self-declared privacy overlords will be kind and benevolent, etc. It’s like there is one person behind all of your accounts, and that person is a big fan of it. That’s why I used the non-derogatory term “party line”.

See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/party%20line

That is in turn called a strawman. And there are many different opinions in the EU regarding the GDPR. I think HN users are non-representative of the general public since they tend to be a lot more concerned about privacy issues - and that no just the users from the EU. But in general, the EU does seem overall more positive towards regulation of business than Americans.

"Party line" implies that it's a position everyone's obliged to take as part of being a party member, rather than something freely and independently reached.

And I suspect the main driver for GDPR cheering is that nothing else has been done about so many other privacy incidents. We can look back on HN and find such things as the massive Equifax leak (the next one of those is going to be interesting!) and the smart TVs that exfiltrate a list of all files on any media inserted.

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