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Google May Close Gmail Germany Over Privacy Law
Matt writes "Google is threatening to shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the German Bundestag passes it's new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, Google's German privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Google's practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any German citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal."
Unlike what the summary suggests, this is not specific to Germany. It's the implementation of a European directive on data retention. And FWIW, the US is indeed less invasive than the EU at this point concerning data retention.
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Outlawing Tor is very much specific to Germany.
Tor will not be outlawed, but anybody who runs a Tor server from within Germany has to log the connection data, which pretty much goes against the idea of Tor.
But running or using Tor in general will not be illegal (from what I unterstand).
Furthermore, that one of the real points of contention is that the UK is trying it's best to prevent the treaty from making a charter of fundamental rights for EU's citizens legally binding.
So for once, rather than complaining about the EU in general and Germany in particular, those of us living in the UK should instead be complaining about how our government at every turn tries to prevent from being bound to give it's citizens any form of protection against it's government.
Here the original Spiegel Article(in German, of course).
Information about the draft law and what people can do to prevent it from being passed can be found at the following site:
http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/ (also in German)
What's scary is the range of people that are supposed to get access to the collected information,
it's not just the police but also "Nachrichtendienste" (news agencies!?) and "ausländische Staaten" (other countries, apparently any that ask)
I'm guessing this is caused by some lobby/bribe action of organizations like the RIAA/MPAA.
I can't think of one good reason of why this might be good for anyone,
criminals will just use bot proxies or other means to bypass the tracking/collection and in the end
it will just be the honest people that get f#cked because with general government incompetence
the the data will end up in the criminal's hand's and used for who knows what.
the GEZ vans are an urban legend
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
we have to *always* carry our passports or other state ID with us at all time
I think you're misunderstanding "Ausweispflicht". We are required to possess a national ID card or a passport, not to carry it with us (which would be "Mitführpflicht"). There is a Mitführpflicht for drivers licenses, but only while driving.Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I was under the impression that Google has refused to provide any functions other than search in China. They don't host their gmail servers or any of their info that contains user info. They don't want the government using them to track its users, and that's the same here as it is in China.
Or has something changed that I hadn't heard about?
--Jimmy