Apologies to my European friends but the EU—or rather its regulators—is becoming tiresome. It’s bad enough that they treat American tech companies as piggy banks—like this almost billion dollar fine because Uber used automated systems to identify and temporarily suspend drivers suspected of fraud—and promulgate regulations that provide European citizens absolutely no benefit while depriving them of the latest technology such as the enhanced Siri from Apple. According to that last link, even European citizens are fed up and protesting the silliness. It doesn’t seem to have had any effect. The regulators keep right on disrupting everybody and everything because…reasons.
Even the much vaunted GDPR cookie rules that were supposed to protect us from online snooping have only made matters worse (see footnote) and subjected the whole world to annoying dickovers assuring us that they value our privacy so would we please let them surveil our activities. Really, their whole regulatory establishment is in need of adult supervision.
All of that is bad enough but this is going too far. Despite repeated, failed attempts to mandate an encryption backdoor, the Commission is trying again. This despite the unanimous opinion of virtually everyone who knows what they’re talking about that a “safe” backdoor is imposible and among other things would be disastrous for digital commerce of all types. Meanwhile, the bad guys will simply roll their own.
What’s worse is that this latest effort will only encourage other jurisdictions to do the same thing. We here in the U.S. can look forward to similar proposals soon.