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weberer an hour ago

>I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before

Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.

riccardomc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It is definitely also about public opinion and it is going to be translated into laws soon enough (i.e. governments mandate data sovereignty).

Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.

It has been brewing for a while.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...

weberer 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

>it is going to be translated into laws soon enough (i.e. governments mandate data sovereignty)

The laws are already there. That's my point.

englishrookie an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, there are also noises about the SaaS company preferably not being American. Apparently there's a US law that compels US companies to divulge data on their users even if the data is hosted outside of the US. (I'm not sure this wouldn't happen anyway, without such a law.)

tracker1 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

Most nations can coerce information from corporate entities within their nation, even information that corporation holds outside said country. To what extents that coercion can hold will of course vary by local laws, customs and the people in charge. The US has a fairly large media footprint, not to mention it's actual physical size and outsized influence even then. So it is more covered and visible.

Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.

I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.

dsl 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Which is just wildly backwards. It is the same mindset of the cyberpunk "privacy advocates" of the early 2000s, move your stuff to Sealand or Switzerland.

The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.

Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.

Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.

john_strinlai 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.

there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.

the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.

secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.

vajrabum 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wish I believed that they have to go to the FISA court for much of anything any more. Instead they go to Palantir and the like which simply buy the data and aggregate it. Very similar to the process of money laundering. And for the data that can't be bought there's the five eyes work around.

tarun_anand 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So probably makes sense to host on EU headquartered companies

embedding-shape 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The fear is not "NSA is snooping on our customer data", it's "Trump has a beef with our premiere minister/president, and Jeff Bezos accepted Trumps request to turn off AWS from them" that's the fear.

We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.

dsl 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

Compelling Microsoft to turn off your Office 365 at least requires Microsoft to be complicit. Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.