Edward Snowden Calls GDPR a Paper Tiger. Accuses of Just Making The Spying Legal. – TechDator

The guy whos been visioning about stringent data protections strikes again.

Edward Snowden, a popular whistleblower who worked for both NSA and CIA, and responsible for leaking classified information of the American governments mass surveillance program on global citizens in 2013. Hes contribution along with The Guardian and other news reporters surprised everyone in the world and made them realise of data thefts.

Though in exile, hes been in constant contact with the world via Twitter and periodical TV shows (video conferencing securely). And today, he has appeared in the opening ceremony of Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal.

In his speech addressing to 20,000 attendees, he termed the big technology companies are running on a data-hungry business models where they abuse the users collected data. All these big corporations, naming Facebook, Google and Amazon, are amassing personal data of millions, or even billions of people that are easily accessible by governments. This makes all those people vulnerable, he opined.

These people are engaged in abuse, particularly when you look at Google and Amazon, Facebook and their business model. And yet every bit of it, they argue, is legal. Whether were talking about Facebook or the NSA, we have legalized the abuse of the person. he said.

While Europes General Data Protection Rights (GDPR) is considered to be an optimal law protecting users data,Snowden isnt even happy about that. He starts with claiming theres a fault in its title itself. He criticized the laws focus on just protecting the gathered data but being okay on spy!

He called GDPR as just a Paper Tiger. Further, he said, It gives us false assurances. The problem is not data protection. It is data collection. GDPR assumes the data was all collected properly in the first place. It is as if it is okay to spy on everyone, as long as the data never leaks. When it does, it is not data being exploited. It is people.

Unlike penalising when theres a data leak, he believes that all such companies has to be penalised every year until their change their methodology.

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Edward Snowden Calls GDPR a Paper Tiger. Accuses of Just Making The Spying Legal. - TechDator