I don’t think anyone credible is taking the position that Meta and Google and Microsoft don’t spy for the US government but TikTok does spy for the Chinese government. This is simply a transparent double standard.
They use spies, we use spies. Simultaneously, both sides try to stop the other.
Calling this "double standards" or hypocrisy isn't technically wrong but it's also very tedious. Of course countries have a different policy towards their own spies and foreign spies. Why should anybody ever expect otherwise?
I mean it in the “technically correct” usage, in reply to someone who seemed to expect a unified standard between China and the US. My point is to be clear that the US is also spying on US citizens, but the government and media only dislike it when other countries do it.
Personally I don’t like that the US government runs mass surveillance against US citizens.
Also mass surveillance and spies are related but have some differences. The US can run mass surveillance through US corporations without spies, though I’m sure they also have spies.
One of the big pieces of Snowden's leaks is how the NSA has a backdoor into all of Google. Of course they're "compliant with the law". The law is to give the government a backdoor. This stuff is decided in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the cases and rulings are classified.
Indeed! Eric Schmidt was regularly meeting with pentagon officials. I think he had stepped down as CEO by the time of those reports, but he was obviously very friendly to US government interests. We really tend to assume that CEOs all want to protect their data from the government but if they don’t want to do that we really can’t know or defend against it while using those services.
We're talking about EU laws. The EU has inspectors, Google has EU datacenters which were built post-Snowden (and built due to the GDPR which was a response to PRISM.) I don't trust Google, but neither does the EU and if they're not fining Google I presume it's because they have more trust that Google is complying with their surveillance laws. Or possibly it's just because they are being strategic with when and how they engage. I do get a sense they have a list of concerns for each company and they are starting with fines for the largest concerns, and don't want to throw so much that the companies cannot respond.
