[ckastner]

The optics of this might look bad, but I cannot really fault Google for this move (and I frequently fault Google).

They're facing a dilemma of regulatory uncertainty, and this move resolves this dilemma for them (at least, they seem to believe that).

Anyone who has ever dealt with powerful regulatory agencies will probably agree that this resolution is the right move for the company, a move important enough that eating some bad PR is probably totally worth it.

(The point about powerful regulatory agencies is not that it's hard to stay compliant; it's that the costs, overhead, bureaucracy etc. of demonstrating this compliance is immense, even if you are doing everything 100% right.)

[rconti]

Pro-Brexiteers have often cited stronger bilateral ties, such as those with the US, as an advantage of Brexit. And of course, post-Brexit, Britain will be ever more reliant on the willingness of countries such as the US to cut deals with them. As an independent negotiator in these new deals, Britain will have less power to push back over silly things like data privacy; and as a member of Five Eyes anyway, they're all too happy to have the US do their spying on their behalf, just like the US likes Britain spying on US citizens to the US Government's benefit.

[Zenst]

The recent Huawei 5G drama does seem to go against the grain of this. After all, if the UK had less power to push back, then clearly nobody has told them.

[realradicalwash]

not sure this is all due to self-agency. China has also threatened them over Huawei. the UK is really between a rock and a hard place

[dilutedh2o]

That sounds really interesting.

Would you mind sharing a resource to learn more about how the UK spies on US citizens?

[andrewjrhill]

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

[kelnage]

Although if you look at the actual text on the UKUSA agreement document HW 80/2 [1], rather than the short synopsis from Wikipedia, it says very clearly that the UKUSA agreement covers only sharing of "foreign communications" where footnote 3 on page explicitly excludes communications of both the UK and the USA.

1. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C1153691...

[kick]

Optic Nerve was one of these things. Basically, GCHQ or NSA hacked Yahoo!, GCHQ used that to collect stills for every single webcam feed on the platform (this! was! back! when! Yahoo! was! still! relevant!), including a lot of intimate photos, so on. Lots of fun stuff there!

But that's a modern example. There are some pretty interesting ones. Here's a fun list of some celebrities that were the targets of a Five Eyes country and were spied on by multiple agencies as a result:

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

[truckerbill]

The snowden leaks touch on it

[NotSammyHagar]

It's not good for the users. Having less control over your privacy and your data is extremely unlikely to be better for the users. Probably less control and regulation is going to be better for Google.

[Zenst]

Might be down to costs.

How much does hosting per account in Ireland compare to USA hosting?

Even if a few pennies/cents, at google's scale - that makes business sense and if they can, they will.

[unbeli]

This has nothing to do with the actual location of the servers holding the data. Which would not be a single location anyway.

[Zenst]

Actually it does play a factor, GDPR had it so the data on EU citizens had to be located within the EU. Now they have alternative options for the UK - then that aspect does as I initially outlined becomes key.

Hence the question of actual costs to Google in hosting in say Ireland (staffing, taxes, rates, utility costs, cooling....) compared with another location outside the EU that may very well have cheaper running costs due to many factors.

I hope that clears up why location is a factor now as it related to running costs and if they can save some money, well, they will.

More so if they suddenly free up capacity in a datacenter which has higher costs than some other locations outside the EU. All these details do very much, however small, stack up at the scale of users Google operates with and for the UK, several million is a large chunk of potential savings.

[duxup]

Seems very much a case of "Man we don't know what the rules are / will be and this seems like the best choice at the moment."