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: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.