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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

I have long campaigned against Fourth Amendment violations in the US, but to compare the US and the EU is laughable. The difference is night and day in every aspect, from constitutional rights to privacy (virtually worthless in most EU constitutions vs quite broad in the US) to practical surveillance (far deeper and broader in the EU) to court requirements for access for typical requests (commonplace in the US, rare in the EU.)

As an example of one of those points, the US right to privacy was long considered so broad that it served as the _foundation of the right to abortion_ in the US for decades! By contrast, to pick an EU example, the Dutch right to privacy is so weak that it is quite literally written into the Dutch constitution as “except as limited by law”; in other words, nearly worthless.

To compare them by presence of a Wikipedia page is beyond ridiculous.

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But what exactly does privacy entail in the US?

Your address and phone number are publicly available with a Google search. I've been stalked and had someone show up at my house after moving (and I have zero social media presence) because, for some reason, my personal info was all online and easily found by googling my name.

People can take a video of you, shame you for some random thing, and have your face and name known to millions by the end of the day.

The NSA can access all your online data and share it with whoever they want. Companies do it on their behalf as well. Cops can dig through your car just by saying it smells funny.

A right to privacy somehow was construed as the right to an abortion. But the right to privacy never meant you have the right to keep anything private. In some other countries, you can easily have your data taken down from public view online and sue (and win against) people who violate that right. That's an uphill battle in the US.

American freedom is general is based on “might makes right”, whether that’s the well armed gunslinger in the old west, the lawyered up millionaire in the courts, or the billion dollar company using their freedom of speech to obliterate yours.

Everyone has the same freedom to use their resources to maximise that freedoms to help with where the fiat meets the nose.

Just double checking...we agree that this is suboptimal, right? Since might does not in fact equal (moral) right?

I'm not arguing for any previous arguments here, just want to argue that "might makes right" is a very dangerous system.

Strawman-ing: It sounds like the argument is "might implies right because you must have done something right to get that money"

There's a lot wrong with that. You didn't earn the money often, because inheritance. And we're assuming the "right" things you did to earn that money for capitalism maps somehow to "right" things for humanity, which obviously isn't a direct 1-1.

And imagine that logic flipped: "Less might makes less right" -> "less might implies less right because you must have done something wrong to not have money". Like, say that to a 5 year old, poor descendent of slaves.

But again, I'm strawman-ing. Just wanted to get that out there.

In the US, mugshots of people are published before they have been found guilty.

Comparing privacy laws by example is beyond ridiculous. And there are big cultural differences what "privacy" entails.

Americans have the right to privacy "except as limited by capitalism". For example, your location history and purchasing history are actively sold for the ad industry. No it is not sufficiently anonymized.

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