Wouldn’t this breach multiple EU privacy laws?
There are exceptions for law enforcement/intelligence in GDPR. Those are particularly broad in the UK data protection act for example.
This is what I’m wondering.
I don’t think it does, as the GDPR does not protect ‘criminals’ or against the police using your data.
LIberté,Egalité,Fraternité.I see this going very poorly very quickly. I don’t know how much longer we’re going to have a France after this, but I’m interested in seeing how this unfolds.
How to make your country burn faster 101
… wtf is going on over there… What kind of douchebags did you guys elect? I mean, I’m American, I know I can’t throw stones here, but y’alls were better than that. You like, wisely stood against our 9/11 invasion and we probably should’ve listened.
But, wtf?
btw, if anyone was too lazy to dig, this publication is a nigerian newspaper that actually seems legit. Founded in 2020, so pretty new still. Looking at their front page they mostly just do local reporting. Has had run-ins with local power.
We elected him as the “last rempart to the extreme right”. Turns out he and his cronies are corrupted authoritarian fucks. Their shit social and economic policies are opening a highway to the actual far right in the near future, most likely 2027.
Lmao bait and switch
More like shitty electoral system that facilitates the choice of a lesser evil instead of the choice for the best candidate.
Sounds like the United States.
They have proportional representation and a ton of parties. It’s a completely different kind of suck. Although I guess they also are presidential.
So what would be a good system? FPTP also sucks, or at least does for local minority voters like me, or if both parties become weak for whatever reason like in the US.
Maybe ranked choice voting, coupled with a parliamentary system instead of a presidential one ? I don’t think there is a perfect system but it would probably move things around in a better direction.
You know that America just… does this, right? No bill, no law… In fact it was the first to do this at all. It’s why in crime shows they remove the battery (from phone where you still can, of course.)
It is not legal for police to spy on citizens via their phone cameras in the US…
Police, no. Homeland security? crickets
Still no. Do they do it anyway? Probably, but that doesn’t make it legal.
If I do something, people find out about it, and I don’t get arrested, it’s defacto legal
No, the “Patriot” Act did authorize stuff like this in the US. There was also the “Freedom” Act, and generally this is all FISA stuff that has very low standards for what’s allowed.
The last election was a shitshow.
As usual, the younger generation didn’t bother voting, and the older one voted en masse for conservative candidates because they are those our media push for, while at the same time slandering progressive ones.
In the election runoff, we had the choice between an openly fascist candidate from a party literally founded by former Nazis, and a “light fascist” one that people were seeing as the lesser evil. Though it’s pretty obvious now that his fascism isn’t so light (he openly admires Petain, a french leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany), and I hope people will remember that for the next election and understand that voting for a democratic candidate in the first turn if very important.
Weird how this sounds alot like what’s happening in the US. Almost like fascism is encroaching all acrost the world as it crumbles.
Yeah, it’s happening all over western liberal democracies. Inflation is going crazy and wealth inequalities are growing at an alarming rate. Because of that, people in power are afraid of a popular uprising, and they would rather see fascists rise to power and protect capitalism, than an economical shift to the left and lose some of their wealth.
It happened many times before. The more commonly known examples being:
- Prominent industrialists and agricultural landowners providing financial support to Mussolini’s party because they feared the rise of socialism, and saw in him a means to counter it.
- German industrialists who were fearful of the rise of the Communist Party and provided financial support to the Nazi party.
- Spanish landowners and businessmen who were alarmed by the social and economic reforms of the Second Spanish Republic and supported Franco’s rise to power.
History tends to repeat itself.
To add to this, it would simply be remiss for any actual rival of the west to not attempt to stir their democracies against them.
It’s a fundamental weakness that only representative governments have, and authoritarians would simply be stupid not to target it. It’s very inexpensive to operate in the modern information space.
I mean, we got all these checks and balances in the first place because our systems are fundamentally very vulnerable. If you’d like a story on a less-secure system, look into the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
I mean, in the craziest of crazy scenarios, we could wind up with civil wars. Wouldn’t there be some folks out there that’d just love to see that? You think they can’t make bots, produce content, hire cheap labor?
Oh yes, voter manipulation is very concerning. Even the simple fact that foreign powers can legally finance a candidate for another country’s presidential election is absolutely crazy to me.
But I think there is something even worse than that:
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When participation is so low that barely 50% of electors cast a vote, with one category of people (the elderly) being massively over-represented.
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When there is no possible recourse if the majority of electors isn’t satisfied with their options, and blank ballots aren’t even accounted for.
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When the main platforms where campaigning happens are all owned by and handful of billionaires, who can choose to present in a good light the candidates that will be the most favorable to them, and do the opposite for others.
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When political campaigns are funded privately (and as I said, sometimes even by authoritarian foreign powers), those who favor billionaires being again at a massive advantage.
The game is so strongly rigged, I’m surprised that the general population still widely considers us democracies. Starting by reforming our electoral systems would do a lot of good and would be a lot simpler than trying to stop social media bots in my opinion, even though we should also tackle that issue.
Main problem is election reform would permanently destroy one of our political parties in its current state, and they are fully aware of this. They will burn our country down with us inside before they let it go, so it is wise to proceed with caution.
I don’t think the rest of the world wants to see not Russia’s nuclear arsenal dispersed, but ours.
Fighting a foreign power, however, rings straight to a huge strength of my country at least, the good ole US–our love of righteousness, competition and victory. This leaves a gap in their strategy, where they intended to inflame tribalism, but that can be turned definitively against them at the drop of a hat.
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Scratch a liberal…
Recently I read it’s actually worse in Europe, because the far-right has noticeable youth support, unlike here where it’s proportional to age.
That makes me very, very nervous.
This seems to be the case yeah. The rhetoric of the left is preaching acceptance and solidarity, but in an uncertain world “feelgood rhetoric” isn’t strong enough. The right are preaching what appear to be solutions (close borders, nationalism, tax cuts to income and gas, segregation and defunding social programs to adress debt) so people buy into it.
What they don’t realise is that the tax cuts hurt the debt cutting messures and eroiding social security hurts nations and paves way for more insecurity, hate and fear (which fuels the right wing machine).
There’s precious little education on politics and choices for 20-somethings, and people are left to try and understand what the media pushes out. Finland benefits from a trusted national news media, though they have been criticized by the right of being politically biased and not worth their budget. So people slanting toward the right tend to be sceptical of it, and are pushed away, toward other news sources.
As far as I know in the Global South we have a wave of left wing governments, maybe you forgot white people is not the world.
In Latin America, definitely. But I’m not sure that there have been a wave of left wing governments elsewhere the Global South, unfortunately.
If people get out and fucking vote like it’s your last chance, we can get some sanity.
Oh, I’m voting alright; but it’s more than likely gonna be all write-ins. My hand to my gods; I would sooner wipe my ass with my ballot and fling that fucker up a tree than cast it for a democrat after what Obama and Biden have done.
Oh? Should people vote for the lesser of two evils? Because that’s your only choice if you continue to insist you can vote your way out of this.
Absofreakinglutely!
There will never be a perfect candidate. This is politics.
Well then enjoy voting for Hitler (D) because that’s what you are going to get.
I mean, I’m American, I know I can’t throw stones here
Right? I’m wary of chastising any first world country at the moment. The past 7 years in particular have been especially WTF
Do they like, want the protests to continue on our something? They can’t be that stupid.
The protests are for police brutality against Minorities. Apparently the shot 17 years old kid was repeatedly hit with back of the gun which made him moves his leg away from the breaks and since it’s an automatic the car started moving forward…the rest is history.
Privacy and anonymity is illusion.
At least it’s happening out in the open? Other states do this without parlimentary or congressional approval.
Interestingly enough I went to a lecture by a Chinese lawmaker yesterday who said the exact same thing. When it’s codified in law, you know what they can and can’t do, and what they can and can’t use in court against you. When governments just do it covertly and subvert due process, your right to privacy suffers a lot more. She didn’t have to point out what Snowden uncovered about the NSA for everyone to know what she was referring to.
A little confused. Regardless of whats legal we know what they ‘can’ do, just not whether its legal or not. What we lose by legalising it is precisely that it can be used in court as legitimate evidence.
Currently in the US everyone knows they have far less privacy from the government, or from corporations for that matter, but ill gotten info cant easily be uses in court.
IMO the really scary thing is that now the government is just buying info from data brokers where the users technically consented in some app’s TOS then using that. Its legally cleaner, and honestly probably better than info they could’ve gotten from from shadier methods.
This will definitely not be misused by anyone in the government. How on the earth did such blatantly dystopian law get passed?
Macron is a NATO puppet.
Yes let’s just say buzzwords without context or reason, makes perfect sense.
French police about to see a whole lotta dick pics.
The Patriot Act took care of that for us in the US!
Fancy French purses are about to take a new direction! Styles range from Étouffé (muffled) to Le Faraday (electromagnetic shielding).
that’d be the point I’d forgo smartphones entirely
While people in the west have been smugly pointing fingers at China, their own governments did everything they’ve been denouncing in China and worse. Congratulations.
The article does not mention, how will this be achieved technology wise? I don’t know of any universal way that a government might activate these features on a person’s phone. Unless network operators/phone manufacturers start installing backdoors. This does not bode well.
I’m wondering the same. Hopefully privacy oriented projects such as GrapheneOS can counter whatever technology they will try to implement.
Patriot act requires them to do so. I am gonna guess they probably will unless they want to go to federal prison.
Jokes on them. Run Linux phone, Android apps become useless. The PinePhones have the modem as an isolated module from the rest of the phone, connected via USB, so the modem can’t do anything too invasive.
Cell carriers can already push apps to your device.
I assume/hope this isn’t true if you bought the phone outside a contract?
Ohhh my sweet summer child. Who is it that is making those phones?
Let me tell you, it’s Google.
