The guy whoโ€™s been visioning about stringent data protections, strikes again.

Edward Snowden, a popular whistleblower who was responsible for leaking classified information of the American governmentโ€™s mass surveillance program on global citizens in 2013. His contribution with The Guardian and other news reporters surprised everyone in the world and realised them of data thefts.

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

Edward Snowden Calls GDPR a Paper Tiger. Accuses For Just Making The Spying Legal.
Edward Snowden Calls GDPR a Paper Tiger. Accuses Of Just Making The Spying Legal.

In his speech addressing to 20,000 attendees, he termed the big technology companies are running on a โ€œdata-hungryโ€ business models where they โ€œabuseโ€ 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.

โ€œThese 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 weโ€™re talking about Facebook or the NSA, we have legalized the abuse of the person.โ€ he said.

Unhappy with GDPR too.

While Europeโ€™s General Data Protection Rights (GDPR) is considered to be an optimal law protecting users data, Snowden isnโ€™t even happy about that. He criticized the lawโ€™s focus on just protecting the data gathered but being okay on spying!

He called GDPR as just a โ€œPaper Tigerโ€œ. Further, he said, โ€œIt 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.โ€

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

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