{"id":101893,"date":"2026-07-24T12:23:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T12:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/101893\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T12:23:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T12:23:10","slug":"the-end-of-internet-privacy-europe-hijacks-american-tech-and-china-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/101893\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of internet privacy: Europe hijacks American tech and China benefits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some Google<\/a> Search user in the European Union<\/a> \u2014 call him Hans or Baptiste or Patrick \u2014 may soon find that intimate information about his life has arrived in the databases of the Chinese<\/a> Communist Party.<\/p>\n

This European may fastidiously maintain his data-privacy hygiene and use every prophylactic available to the everyday user \u2014 but to no avail. The European Commission last week determined that Google Search must convey search data to competitors. These data are to be granular and extensive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to keep that process fair and ensure that our citizens have choice,\u201d Teresa Ribera, a European official, said. In recent decades, as the regulatory<\/a> code has swelled, users have received from the masters of continental technology policy myriad new choices, at least by bespoke European definitions of the word. But privacy and data security are not to be had by anyone, no matter how badly he might desire it.<\/p>\n

The beneficiaries of this largesse may include, well, whoever possesses even a bit of the creativity and manpower of our chief geopolitical rivals. \u201cAll a hostile foreign intelligence service needs to do to gain detailed intelligence on the individual searches of all EU citizens is to obtain access through a formally compliant search engine, AI-search wrapper, a mock AI chatbot, or funded front company,\u201d privacy specialist Lukasz Olejnik writes<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Users expose themselves to Google Search and similar digital platforms, into which they pour queries about their interests and habits, their fascinations and their fears, their psychological disturbances and their premonitions of good and ill health. When communicating with these platforms, the inhibitions that might in a conversation with another human being bar total honesty or candid questioning are shed; the user, in one sense, stands (or sits, usually) naked, unmasked. Search data, once assembled, can trace an extraordinary psychological<\/a> portrait of a person.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The European Commission covers up the enormity of its order in professions of fidelity to privacy. \u201cThe decision ensures anonymisation of search data,\u201d the body said. But this clothing, like the fairy tale emperor\u2019s, will do little to veil the private affairs of users from prying eyes \u2014 or to prevent search data from being associated with individuals. \u201cIn the case of search data, relatively small amounts of information can be sufficient to isolate individuals within a dataset. Sequences of queries, combined with coarse location and timing data, can act as a unique behavioural signature,\u201d notes<\/a> the Chamber of Progress, a trade group. This is particularly so when search data is combined with other data that can be obtained cheaply, for relatively little cost and effort. De-anonymization is a game of connect-the-dots \u2014 the more dots provided, the easier for intelligence services and cybercriminals to trace the image.<\/p>\n

The trust reposed in Google rests on the expectation that search data provided is data concealed \u2014 one\u2019s secrets safe, dying with Google in the far reaches of the digital ether. It is this simple expectation of privacy<\/a>, so essential to modern digital life, that the Europeans have rendered a fiction.<\/p>\n

At Google\u2019s founding in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin could hardly have foreseen how their endeavor would morph and expand; their understanding, in the final analysis, could hardly have exceeded the general public\u2019s. Technology companies embark with an idea apt for their time and place, discovering, if they gain success over decades, many new innovations, capacities, and product models en route.<\/p>\n

SUPREME COURT JUST SLAMMED THE DOOR ON WARRANTLESS LOCATION SPYING<\/a><\/p>\n

These efforts are, however, undertaken knowing that labor\u2019s fruit \u2014 profit, made by virtue of superior technology, intellectual property, and trade secrets \u2014 will be enjoyed. To prop up Google\u2019s subpar competitors, European regulators \u2014 who seem to believe Google Search to be a public good to be reshaped and distributed arbitrarily \u2014 endanger the very property on which the company\u2019s continued success relies. If such treatment is the reward of success, technologists will cease to seek success altogether, robbing users of the innovations that would, absent regulatory myopia, have emerged in the coming years. However, the thief is not Google but the EU.<\/p>\n

To satisfy its hunger to regulate, the continent must go abroad in search of American technology firms to destroy \u2014 its own tech sector<\/a> it has long since regulated into obscurity. The General Data Protection Act, of particular note, flattened innovation in pursuit of an expansive notion of data privacy. But when the great hunger flares, the EU dispenses with privacy easily, almost without thought; the privacy interests of Google users have little value to technocrats when they would halt, and not accelerate, regulatory meddling.<\/p>\n

David B. McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some Google Search user in the European Union \u2014 call him Hans or Baptiste or Patrick \u2014 may…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2385],"tags":[78,81,661,4,256,40,4600,6953,450,4013,834],"class_list":["post-101893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-european-commission","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-china","tag-data","tag-europe","tag-european-commission","tag-european-union","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-privacy","tag-regulations","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}