Some governments ignore it, pretty much all governments have tried to find ways to limit the right to privacy. It has not been terribly effective. As far as I can tell constitutional protections in a few countries (like Germany) have been far more effective.
ICE is doing things that have nothing to do with them. DHS has subpoenaed tech companies to unmask people who criticize ICE online, and a federal judge ruled ICE likely violated the First Amendment by sending agents to warn a man over an email.
Hundreds of US citizens have been detained by immigration agents, and most were never charged with anything. Federal judges, including Trump appointees, have found illegal detentions THOUSANDS of times.
Enforcing the law is the OPPOSITE of violating the Constitution.
This is dishonest. Claiming that it is bad for " ICE and the DOJ have used social media and every government database they can" to detect illegal immigrants, especially in the context of talking about Nazi Germany, with the implication that ICE is morally equivalent to the Nazis using bureaucratic records to find and persecute their enemies, is in fact an argument against enforcing border laws.
It's completely reasonable for the government to have records of which people are citizens and of what the specific legal status is of non-citizens present in the country. It's completely reasonable for the police agencies in charge of enforcing border laws to use those records to find people in violation of those laws and arrest and deport them. It's completely reasonable for the same police agencies to look at social media posts of people talking, sometimes even bragging, about their undocumented status and use that as a basis to arrest and deport them for violating immigration law.
The only reason not to think this is if you think it's inherently wrong to enforce immigration laws at all, which many people do, and often lie about because it sounds extreme to say it that bluntly.
Bullshit.
There are a HUGE number of reasons to think that there should be meaningful controls over what data the government aggregates and accesses, and how that's handled.
Fuck off with your authoritarian horseshit, and your dreams of an omnipotent government.
This is reasonable in principle. I think that those meaningful data controls should make citizenship and legal immigration status completely public and completely transparent to all parts of the government, as well as to the general public, at all times. So not only should ICE and every single other government agency be able to instantly tell if someone they are interacting with is a citizen, a legal immigrant, or an illegal immigrant - I personally as an ordinary citizen should be able to do the same thing; in the same way that right now I can look up who gave donations to political candidates or parties by name, or look at someone's ID and figure out if it's legal or illegal for me to sell them alcohol.
Targeting specific minorities and political opponents, and detaining US citizens without access to legal representation or their families. I'm not sure how you missed these events which have been widely reported, and are unprecedented and illegal (but with a cowardly lack of any pushback / checks+balances).
The parent comment is obviously speaking about what happened in Hitler's Germany
However, I'm not sure how the abuses perpetrated by totalitarian regimes map to regulation such as GDPR, which primarily constrains private entities. Compared to their US counterparts, European governments are not all that more hesitant to use spyware, tap phones, etc. In the same vein, Flock doesn't hold a candle to pervasive camera-based surveillance in the UK.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US should have federal privacy legislation and there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the private sector today, but it's a bit more complicated than "GDPR is there to stop the Nazis". It probably fits better into the general culture of distrusting and regulating private enterprise (maybe for good reasons).
If corporations (public or private) have data the government wants, then the government gets it. This can even be used as a way to circumvent tighter regulations on the government; see Flock for an example.
Secondly, it's the corporations that are paving the way here. Yeah, governments are obviously capable of designing and producing their own tech, but if the corporations have already made it? Than it's so much easier for the government to use it.
As you said, this is so nobody in government can collect all kinds of data about citizens, to do bad things to them.
Some people would like to have, say, a public wealth register today, and the above is exactly why others heavily oppose those ideas.
GP’s argument applies to the design of German state bureaucracy. E.g there exist no unified German identification number but several for different purposes (tax, pension etc.). This is directly motivated from the Nazi regime as GP told us. That’s also why the Stasi is not often cited as an argument because the GDR developed in parallel with the West German state.
I would say that these precautions are not enough to prevent a 21st century authoritarian regime from rising and using data. Most of the interesting data is in the hand of privatized public places (social media). We can see these issues already happening with ICE in the US
The Stasi were low-tech card catalogs and blackmail.
The Nazis used IBM, and digitized census data that had already been collected and was just there to be used.* Places without extensive census data are where Jews survived. Plenty of people didn't even know they were "Jewish" until the Nazis told them.
It absolutely maps to GDPR. I bet that if you pulled a few good sources of private data, you could map every single e.g. homosexual in the US, with few false positives or negatives. This could still happen if we passed a privacy law tomorrow, and only used data collected until today.
The odds are very much non-zero that this will happen. It should be illegal to collect and trade in massive collections of dossiers on US citizens. The government can just buy them. Weird how we could see it as bad when it was anti-Chinese propaganda about "social credit," but Americans don't know that it's illegal in just about every country in the world to collect and make decisions based on dragnet "credit ratings" like we do here.
The problem with GDPR is that Europeans don't control anything; and they don't really make rights, they make guidelines that they call "rights" but that they can break whenever they want or whenever they want to buy American. GDPR is just a restraint on Europeans, nobody else has to care, and European companies and governments can just buy the info they want about their own populations from Americans who will be happy to sell it to them.
The problem with initiatives like GDPR is that they don't actually solve the problem. If you're worried about the SS then a law that tries to tell companies what they can do with some data is totally useless, because the thing you need is for the companies to not have the data.
If Apple can run code as root on every iPhone then when the SS comes, the SS can run code as root on every iPhone. They go to Apple and put a gun to their head, or infiltrate the company with operatives, and then do what they please with the central control the company already holds.
To prevent that you need to change the architecture of the systems in popular use to remove central chokepoints that authoritarians could use for censorship and surveillance. But none of those initiatives have accomplished that, and most of them don't even attempt it, even though that's the thing you'd need them to do.
You need "no chokepoints" to be the pre-existing default when the baddies come so that when they try to change it, people can already see why they shouldn't and refuse to give up the existing systems without it. Instead of needing to develop those systems only after the need arises, and then needing to do it under a hostile regime which is meanwhile using the existing systems to commit atrocities.
And even then it’s a crap shoot
Hayek offers a significant observation that things that work among small orders, like a family, don’t work when applied to a whole city. It speaks to the gap between a single police officer seeing something and a city-wide camera crime detection network.
Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. [Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit]