European Webmail Privacy: Even Worse Than I Thought

I’ve been critical of the claim that European privacy law offers more protection against government surveillance than American law. Apparently not critical enough. An Ars Technica reporter with a pro-privacy inclination decided to seriously investigate using a German email system to get the benefits of European privacy law.

His tale of disillusionment revealed three privacy deficits in European law that even I hadn’t noticed when I trashed the myth of European privacy superiority. First, unlike their US counterparts, German email providers are unable to issue transparency reports of the sort that US companies have been publishing:

"German law forbids providers to talk about inquiries for user data or handing over user data," Löhr added. "We are currently investigating a possible way with our lawyer to issue a transparency report about questions from police like Google, Microsoft, and [many] other US providers do, but we can not promise we will be able to do so. We