Privacy Ombudsman Could Handle EU Complaints About US Surveillance (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes with this story from Beta News: One of the greatest problems facing anyone trying to tackle the problem of privacy on the web is dealing with the ideologies of different countries, and how this affects data sharing. A level of surveillance that is deemed acceptable in the US, for instance, may be considered completely objectionable in another. The latest suggestion to help overcome this seemingly insurmountable problem is to set up a privacy ombudsman that would be able to handle European complaints and queries about US surveillance.

Comments

Re:"level of surveillance that is deemed acceptabl

[frovingslosh]

A level of surveillance that is deemed acceptable in the US, for instance, may be considered completely objectionable in another.

I think what they mean to say is that in some European countries and the EU itself, people still have rights guaranteed by a constitution and and the countries are not ruled by a bunch of thugs who consider it a minor inconvenience that can and should be ignored. The text should have read " .... deem acceptable by the thugs who rule us .... ".

The California Franchise Tax Board has Ombudsmen

[tlambert]

The California Franchise Tax Board has Ombudsmen.

Being paid by the state, you can guess their answer when you raise a grievance against the state...

Re:It is a culture difference..

[Teun]

An example that brings out the difference in democracy between say The Netherlands and the US is the amount of money spend during elections.

The combined budgets of the various Dutch political parties for national elections will probably be around ten million euro's, that's divided over 20 different groups and 150 seats on a population of 17 million.
For the US population equivalent it would be less than 500 million. This is one reason we can still trust politics, it's near impossible to buy yourself a seat.

And then there is the fact that many EU countries will never have a single party government, it's typically a coalition of different parties.