ST bows to the China-style freedom of navigation.

[elKarro]

Dear members of the community, how many of us developers are comfortable with this ***:

 

[TDK]

An EU company adhering to EU laws seems reasonable to me.

[LCE]

I'm perfectly okay with this.

What's your problem with that?

 

 

[elKarro]

Thanks @LCE and @TDK for your participation in this unusual topic.
I understand that the point is not immediately detectable, so, to avoid misunderstandings:
ST maintains free tools for developers, and I agree with them when they require a login to know who downloads from their servers.
But what the EU wants here is to keep track of the internet connection's subscriber and the physical location of the IP address. This is a piece of the puzzle, if we consider what the EU is trying to do with the Chat Control law. I kindly invite you to learn what it’s about: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

That said, I would reply to @TDK :
if Chat Control becomes law, do you still think EU subjects must adhere to it, just because the EU Parliament decided so?

We are free individuals before we are engineers, and we must reject any form of collection of our personal data. What is happening through these subtle forms of control is that we are all treated as potential criminals, and we must prove our honesty. And the direction being taken is to apply the definition of "criminal" to anyone who disapproves of an oligarchy.

To get a preview of EU intentions, consider that Italy is often the lab for EU experiments, so take a look at what happened in Italy last week, under a directive that seems like a bag of tricks:
if a person reaches a certain number of views on social media, and if any of their posts disappoints (on an arbitrary basis, of course) a so-called "agency for communications" (which is not a court of law), that agency has been granted powers that could lead to the revocation of the publisher's passport, by making it economically impossible to appeal. Who's next?

Kind regards

[TDK]

I would hope ST focuses on their strengths--technical innovation--and not breaking laws in the name of political activism.

This is a technical forum for technical questions and answers. Not everything needs to be a political fight.

[LCE]

This here at ST is not personal, this is business.
I do not consider this forum here as "social media".

And I absolutely support the EU's export regulations, IMO they should be even much stricter, considering that lots of "western electronics" were found in weaponry by which EU-friendly countries were attacked.

This is getting dangerously political... 

[elKarro]

Debating the rules of the society we belong to is not dangerous, it's a sign of civility.

I agree, development tools can be dangerous in the wrong hands, but think deeper: in the EU, we have authentication methods based on digital identity that still preserve an anonymized internet connection, so why not use one of those?
The paradox is that tracking a real IP address doesn't identify the user with certainty, it only speculates about their presence at a given place and time, so it is a pure violation of privacy. Device tracking and fingerprinting, applied to ordinary citizens, will never have a place in a free and civil society.
With all my respect to Chinese people, EU must not become like the Chinese regime.