US Government's Failure To Protect Public Privacy Is Driving Business Overseas

from the all-for-what? dept

As we've covered over and over again, the US government has made it clear that it wants access to your data. With things like the FISA Amendments Act, ECPA and various other laws, law enforcement plays the FUD card repeatedly, insisting that it needs to be able to go in and see data to "protect" the public. There's very little basis to make this claim. And, worse, by decimating online privacy, the US government may actively be driving business outside of the US to foreign countries that have stricter privacy laws that actually protect data from government snooping.

Many foreign companies are converging toward a common argument for why they’re better than their American competitors. It’s not that the foreign-made technology is better, more resilient, or more ubiquitous, nor that the foreign companies are more innovative or better managed. They compare not their businessmen but their politicians. They argue simply that American laws undermine any American product — that these laws fail to protect privacy of personal or business information of all users. This argument works partly because consumers claim to “avoid doing business” with companies they don’t trust to protect their privacy.

Basically, because law enforcement believes it needs to build a much bigger haystack as it searches for needles, we're handing other countries a key selling point in setting up services to compete with US services: "you can't trust any service based in the US, because it's subject to government surveillance." That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I know I've see a number of companies lately who advertise the fact that they're not based in the US to suggest that they're more secure and can keep your data private. This is not the reputation the US needs or wants right now.