171–180 of 186 posts
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The problem is not that it is possible but that it is done without consent or oversight.
Isn't that solved by cookie pop-ups? And: Why is it important to consent?
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>They are also expanding into the US currently. This makes it worse, since they fall under US CLOUD Act now.
I think they created a subsidiary company in the US for their US offering and I don't think the US cloud act can compel the parent company to do anything? Whereas the inverse direction was problematic.
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I think part of it is desperation. There is absolutely nothing the EU can say that will convince the American politicians that privacy and corporations are out of control in the US. Americans might believe it's fine, but Germans are careful about how personal data is handled and who has access to it. Culturally the US and Europe is drifting further apart and from the European side it's very hard to see that the US is…
American here - we absolutely do not think it's fine. There is no cultural drift[0]. The reason why we don't have GDPR-like laws is that our political system uses culture wars as a distraction tactic. There are plenty of things that Americans absolutely support that have a snowball's chance in hell if it were put into the form of a bill for Congress to vote on. The EU basically threatening to ban the US from the Inte…
Also consider how it looks from outside : you can't expect to be aware of all the internal political details of all the countries, at some point you have to consider the people and their government as a single entity (remember how this is also what nations are supposed to be ?)
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I believe that it would come down to this as well. The problem is both them being located in the US AND being a US company. Alternatively they could mirror an approach that Microsoft had with ther Office Online for a while, that is find a European company acting as "trustee" for the data, so that even if the NSA came knocking the US based company would not have any data on any of their infrastructure it could give th…
I believe that Microsoft is already licensing Azure tech to big European companies to host GDPR-compliant, Azure-compliant regions in Europe. More expensive than regular Azure regions, but still in use for some purposes. Given that the big 3 cloud providers already have some trouble providing stable operations, I suspect it won't be the pinnacle of reliability, but have no first-hand experience with them.
Pricing for services in the EU GDPR "Sovereign" safe-zones (e.g. "Germany Central (Sovereign)") is largely the same as for services in other zones:
Azure App Service in Germany Sovereign: $62/mo
Azure App Service in West US: $54/mo
1TB Azure Storage in Germany Sovereign: $21.00
1TB Azure Storage in West US: $20.80/mo
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As for reliability, I haven't noticed any difference in availability and downtime between my Azure resources in any of the zones I've got services in. YMMV. Lately Azure's actually looking pretty good compared to AWS's spate of outages over the past 6 months.
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American here - we absolutely do not think it's fine. There is no cultural drift[0]. The reason why we don't have GDPR-like laws is that our political system uses culture wars as a distraction tactic. There are plenty of things that Americans absolutely support that have a snowball's chance in hell if it were put into the form of a bill for Congress to vote on. The EU basically threatening to ban the US from the Inte…
I sometimes see this argument that nations aren't responsible for what their leaders do... but don't they ? After all it was the nation that elected those leaders to represent them ! (This principle is sometimes applied even to the non-nation peoples, in non-democratic countries, as in "you get the leaders that you deserve".) Also consider how it looks from outside : you can't expect to be aware of all the internal p…
As an example of this, consider right-to-repair. In cases where it has been put up to a popular vote, it wins dramatically - like, 75% to 86% in favor. But if you go to legislators, they laugh you out of the room; and if they don't laugh you out of the room the governor vetoes it. This is an issue where the American public see it as obvious that repair should be open to all; while many of our politicians either just disagree with the concept, are worried about "intellectual property theft", or don't want to be the first to sponsor something that will wind up being in the next election's attack ads.
So what we have is a situation where Americans and Europeans are more aligned with one another than they are with American politicians.
I also really hate the whole "you get the leaders that you deserve" mentality, especially when applied to non-democratic societies. Not everyone voted for those leaders, nor does everyone always have the opportunity to vote in the first place. The whole concept of a "nation" is at best a convenient fiction; and worst an outright cancer that has fucked over several regions of the world. If you do not understand the internal divides of a nation, at least on a basic level, then you're just engaging in useless stereotyping.
I have read here on HN a comment which said the following : US companies will still be at an advantage as they can still mine their other customers and use this knowledge for their EU operations as well. EU based companies will not be allowed to mine US customers the same way.
How well does the insight from one region and culture to another?
very, very little.
see https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...
The part in most curious about is not even the usual web services we talk about here, but who will be the new big pipe provider in the EU. Who can compete with CloudFlare / Fastly / Akamai / Maxcdn with the raw bandwidth of DDoS that they can sink in their network. Anyone apart from Gcore labs?
I keep hearing that claim, yet it is never backed up by any substantive evidence or actionable advice as to which of these apparently abundant exclusively EU-based services to use for solving a particular problem. Well, other than the usual Fathom and Plausible, that is. It might come as a surprise to some, but the web and software in general isn't just comprised of analytics. Just to try and prove myself wrong I sea…
If FOSDEM, a pretty large but fully volunteer-run organization can host their own videos, why can't you?
Secondly, hosting videos is not my core business. The shop around the corner doesn't run its own payment system either, after all.
Finally, I don't need to host videos, I need a video conferencing software, which is something entirely different.
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Oh, I don't know, maybe writing it so that it doesn't mean companies in the EU "basically have to cease all economic activity"? Or writing it so that it doesn't claim to tell me what I have to do with my website when I live in another jurisdiction. I laugh at GDPR. The EU can keep its bureaucracy to itself thank you very much. Making simple websites illegal and forcing me to hire a lawyer to figure out not what I'm a…
> basically have to cease all economic activity I'm sorry, but that's the same bullshit argument that the Danish online retailers are making. So apparently it is absolutely impossible to do business, of any kind, without violating users privacy? Sure, some business can't function under the GDPR, that is true. The question then become, do we actually care? I don't. Those who can not deal with the GDPR are either extre…
As a business, technically you're simply not allowed to have dealings with US-based companies anymore if you want to be GDPR-compliant.
It doesn't matter if that relation is direct or transitive. If you buy a product or service from an EU-based company, even if data on their servers is guaranteed to never physically leave the EU you're still in violation of GDPR in case that company is owned by a US-based parent company.
The reason for this is that with FISA US law enforcement can force US-based companies to hand over any data, even if that data is stored with an international subsidiary under a completely different jurisdiction.
Now, you might say: "See? This is GDPR working as intended." While that's technically true that doesn't take economic reality into account. It's simply not possible to have an exclusively EU-based economy. Otherwise, why would the EU even need to negotiate trade agreements with other countries (which during the Brexit debate has often been cited as one of the main benefits that comes with being an EU member)?
Why do businesses even have to deal with this? This is a problem at the national and international level and it needs to be solved at that level. Why is it impossible for the EU to demand a FISA exemption for EU-based companies - US-owned or not? That's not an unreasonable demand, after all, given that FISA interferes with other jurisdictions.
The reason is the EU is weak. It's far easier to bully local companies into submission than to do the right thing and stand up to the US.