Re: The more I listen to the EU...
Seems so. Barnier's comment that "This autonomy allows us to set standards for the whole of the EU, but also to see these standards being replicated around the world." is practically American in its arrogance: "We'll set the standards alone, and we expect everyone else to adopt them".
This belies a fundamental lack of understanding (or deliberate misrepresentation) of what Barnier is saying. The EU has (pretty good) regulations about how member states can allow personal data to be used (see GDPR). These sit on the basic tenet that an individuals data belongs to them, and they choose who gets access to it and for what purpose. Part of this is to not allow personal data to be passed to third countries unless they have similar regulations to protect that data.
For example, an insurance company operating in France cannot collect the information about you it needs in order to insure your car and then pass that information onto a data processing company based in a country where it could be sold on for profit (for example, countries where an individual has no rights to such data like North Korea, Russia, or the US). This is all perfectly logical.
'Adequacy' in this sense is simply a way of saying, "your regulations are good enough". What UK.gov is trying to do is get itself into a situation where it doesn't have to worry about being declared 'adequate', and still be involved in that decision-making process, despite not being part of the EU and not being under the jurisdiction of the ECJ, which is the governing body for making sure people adhere to those regulations. A cynic would suggest that May specifically wants this because otherwise there would be no way we would get the adequacy rating without her having to give up her data-collection fetishism, which blatantly breaches the whole concept of an individual owning the data about them.
What Barnier is saying, in short, is that if other countries want to play with EU data, they have to do it according to EU rules. The EU isn't trying to make other countries follow the rules for their own citizens, although the up-shot is that if a country were to say that they protect the data of EU citizens, and not their own citizens, then there would be political pressure from within their own country to adopt the same protections for everyone.
Just because the EU are the first bloc to adopt such regulations doesn't mean that they are being arrogant, in the way that the US tries to project its laws overseas.
Of course, this is only a problem for countries which don't accept that individuals have the right to control their own personal information. You do agree that this is a good thing, right? Because otherwise, you would be advocating a situation where either the state, or the rich and powerful directly control the personal information of individuals. One of those options sounds like Stalinism to me, whilst the other sounds like fascism. Feel free to disagree, but both of those ideologies have been shown to be somewhat flawed by history (unless you're a fan of mass murder).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
