Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

>effectively hiding it from US mass surveillance

How effective would it really be?




If Facebook had EU servers, then they would need access to the data on those servers from the USA. Technically the NSA can still force everything out of Facebook in the USA, I guess.

But this will again be incompatible with EU law. According to the ruling of the CJEU (at least what I understood from it), any company collecting data cannot hand this data over to an entity which is suspected to take part in a system of mass surveillance. Thus, as long as the NSA can reach Facebook's EU servers, it shouldn't legally be possible to have Facebook in the EU.

So I'm really interested in what kind of solutions they will find. If I needed to guess, and the CJEU ruling is the guideline, I'd say that this is a thing that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc. can't really solve by themselves. Rather, the US government needs to take action. There needs to be some agreement.

But, if the EU insists on its stance, that agreement had to be really weird since not even US citizens have that kind of protection from their own secret services.


It will be interesting to see how much cost companies will bear before they give up on Europe.


I used to be product manager of a popular online dating site serving the German-speaking countries in Europe. I and my team were in New York, the developers were in the UK, and who knows where the servers were. Safe Harbor made it very easy for us to work this way, but if we had to locate the servers locally today I don't think that would be a big deal.

It didn't matter to us where the data was, and for that reason I don't think it's going to make a difference to customers either. You have safe harbor because the organization gives a shit about keeping the data safe, not because a regulation makes it so.


What's your conclusion? Will it be easy or costly to have location-dependent data and will they do it?


In Europe it's just going to get harvested by the GCHQ and the other European nations intelligence organisations.


Wrong. In _Europe_ it's going to get snarfed up by those hypocrites _and_ by the NSA.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: