The European Union respects data privacy; the United States does not.
The Wall Street Journal’s report that E.U. regulators fined Meta, Facebook’s parent, $1.3 billion for privacy violations struck a raw nerve. The United States has no laws to protect the privacy of consumer data, and Meta was fined because it transferred data collected from its European users for storage in the United States.
E.U. regulators expressed concern that this U.S.-stored data would be purloined by American spy agencies without knowledge or legal recourse of the people from whom it was collected purloined.
Instead of stealing consumer data, U.S. spy agencies are now buying, and sharing, vast quantities of personal data, replacing the intrusive surveillance that spy and law enforcement agencies, domestic and foreign, once used. This is the conclusion of a report commissioned by the Director of National Intelligence. The purchase of data is not subject to Fourth Amendment restraints.