The EU is of course a massivly complex beast and to talk about these issues in a hacker news comment I had to simplyfy.

While its correct that the EU does not have these things, even if they want to have them. The agreements for information exchange and other programs alonge these lines do get negotiated above the state-to-state level and the EU is absolutly involved.

Second, privacy laws that pass on the EU level are required to be implemented by memeber states.

Preventative saving of connection metadate is an example where germany had to pay fines to the EU because they did not comply (I can give more resources if you want). This caused the issue to come back again and again in Germany because compliance with EU level rules is a major political goal of many parties.

So yes, the EU is not yet as powerful as I made out. But the agreements between the member state make compliance to a common framework far more likely.

> It is also a myth that EU enforcement of privacy rights (or antitrust laws) is used for protectionism.

Your arguments don't confine me. Just because the EU also goes after its own cooperation very often as well, does not mean that all of these actions have the same motivation.

You can go and read in detail about how large media groups tried to use EU regulation against google, specifically google indexing of their results. They advanced HIGHLY privacy threading solutions and a large number of politicians go on board of of the anti-google train.

This is well documented in the German hacker community, there are lots of talks, podcast, write ups about this and other issues like it.

Now you can argue that the politicians were just good willed Samaritans but if you choice to believe that we don't really have to argue anymore.

> Stuff like this is purely conspiratorial. And it doesn't even make sense: If there's a "you must share user data with the government"-law in the making, how do privacy rules make it easier to pass today than at any point in the past?

You think regulation of internal company data usage of a foreign cooperation does not serve as precedence for further regulation about usage and law applying to that exact same data?

Again, this sort of things have been document again and again. The government starts collecting data for one reason, promising it will not be used for other things. Once it is established and the data exists, political pressure mounts because everybody wants it.

If the EU/France government has exact information and monitoring ability of all Facebook internal data movement, it will make it far more likely that will go further. That is simply public choice theory. Also, again, there are lots of examples, this is exactly what happened with the Maut system in Germany.

> With privacy coming up in the news any time the EU picks a fight with one of these companies, it seems as if their actions would only serve to educate the public about the value of privacy. And would such rules not actually lessen the value of the data amassed by companies, making it less useful to gain access?

The value lots is a far, far less then what you assume. These news are bigger in our bubble, most people in most of Europe know absolutely nothing about these data regulations and they don't know that France is trying to do anything. Even if they did, it would have no impact on the profit of google or Facebook. They have been in the news about these issues over and over again and there is absolutely no long term impact on their stock prices.

tl:dr; There are examples of all these mechanism in the EU and between the EU and members