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German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

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Re: German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

#341

Post by wirrbel »

arsome wrote: post #160
wirrbel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand the hope is that companies will comply rather than forego the entire European market, but if they don't, the last consequence is ultimately on the consumer, not the company. Essentially you are asking „why should a government expect anyone to follow the law“

It's more "why should a government expect any foreign company to follow the law". Personally I run a small business, GDPR came out, our solution is to just violate it and not care. They have no legal jurisdiction over us so their laws do not matter. If we had to comply with every jurisdictions special laws on the entire planet we'd surely waste most of our time doing it.

It seems you are not doing business within the EU. Microsoft does business within the Eu and how important that business is you could see when Munich tread the water to migrate to Linux and open office

Re: German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

#342

Post by usrbinbash »

n8cpdx wrote: post #220
usrbinbash wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investments in that area would be investment into European open source development as a whole and European IT in general. Businesses can spring up around such efforts, people can find employment, technology can be developed, and the European market could be strengthened.

Why haven’t Europeans been able to be successful in this area already? It’s not like there aren’t always European businesses working on this problem. It is striking that both the evil empire solution (Microsoft 365) and the underdog disruptive upstart (Google Docs, at least that’s what it was ~15 years ago) are both American companies. iWork is American, Zoho is Indian. Why aren’t Europeans producing competitive soft…

> Why aren’t Europeans producing competitive software?

They absolutely do;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamViewer_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Systems

Just 4 examples from Germany. There are countless software companies in Europe, and not just western...eastern Europe is going big in IT in some areas as well. The ability is certainly there.

As to why that didn't (yet) result in good EU-centric alternatives to some of the big US providers in certain areas of IT...good question. I think the correct answer will be a mix of startup culture, government appreciation for the topics importance, convenience of existing solutions, marketing, and several other topics. Certainly not an easy question to give an answer to.

Re: German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

#343

Post by usrbinbash »

brookst wrote: post #209
almostnormal wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few billion is no problem. Simply collect the GDPR defined maximum fine of 4% of total global revenue from Microsoft, and use that to build the alternative. Provide that solution for self-hosting, so the cost of the infrastructure is payed for by the user organizations.

Why would Microsoft (or Google, or anyone) continue to operate in Europe in that model? Seems like a recipe to go from an imperfect tech solution to none at all.

> Why would Microsoft (or Google, or anyone) continue to operate in Europe in that model

Because the european single market has a GDP of about 16.3 TRILLION dollars (2020 estimate, source; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market)

By GDP, it's the third biggest market in the world, directly behind the US and China.

Re: German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

#344

Post by account42 »

Arathorn wrote: post #84
lgreiv wrote: post #50

My personal favorite outcome of this would be a joint public and corporate funded leap in open source development. This would do much for the budget, privacy and probably also security of businesses and private users. A good example where this principle is already in use is the Matrix protocol.

Getting the balance of this right to prevent a tragedy of the commons turns out to be hard. Element (who funds most of Matrix dev) has released almost everything we do as permissive-licensed FOSS open source. As a result, there's a huge ecosystem of folks building commercial solutions on Matrix. But surprisingly little $ actually gets back to Element (or the Matrix Foundation) from those commercial solutions, if any.

Perhaps its actually good that one company can't capture significant ammounts of money when the goal should be to move away from single-company communication tools. Of course the Foundation does need funding and I think it would be in Germany's / the EU's interest to secure that.

Re: German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

#345

Post by vdfs »

piva00 wrote: post #25
vdfs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the cost of doing business for them, implementing and complaining with EU laws might cost even more than the fine

The fine is so outrageously high (up to 4% of global revenue) exactly so this argument can't be made. It's really hard to imagine that implementing proper privacy controls would cost 4% of Microsoft's global revenue, it amounts to US$ 8B for the past year...

But more privacy mean less data they get and less revenue they generate by using that data, similar to how Meta/Google are affected by Apple privacy changes, at least that's my speculation

Re: German privacy watchdogs conclude that Microsoft 365 is incompatible with GDPR

#346

Post by nix23 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #316
nix23 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that before or after they send the content of you powerpoint file?

If you're referring to the article posted last week, you need to read more than just the headlines

>you need to read more than just the headlines

It's sending your contend without consent...what's the problem?

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