[nsl73]

> It would help address the spyware concern by moving it to a US company

Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives? It’s incredible that Azure, and the rest of the us based cloud providers, have been able to rebrand American severs as the cloud so successfully that they are well known for being secure and safe.

[ogre_codes]

> Does anyone else remember when housing data in US severs was considered less private than alternatives?

Right now much of Europe considers storing data in the US to be less private than hosting it locally. The US is certainly not in the same category as Russia or China, but it's not great either.

[sandworm101]

Canada too.

[3pt14159]

Even so, Canadians trust Americans far more than the Chinese. If they move everything over then it may stop mass bans across the West.

[tonyarkles]

That’s probably true for the general population, but not so much for our privacy legislation. Certain categories of data, for some provincial governments, absolutely must reside in Canada and can’t be hosted in the US. Among the various reasons is the Patriot Act. Canadian laws specify certain circumstances in which a data breach must be disclosed to the user, and the Patriot Act (via NSLs) can mandate that the breach not be disclosed to the user. Canadian companies hosting their data in the US cannot simultaneously comply with the law in both countries.

[talloaktrees]

I don't think anyone with knowledge has ever seriously conisdered servers in China more private than US servers. Unless your goal was to keep information private only from the US government.

[freehunter]

Every major cloud vendor has zones outside the US. Just because you’re hosted on Azure doesn’t mean you’re hosted in the US or that US law applies to you.

[tboughen]

My understanding of the 2018 CLOUD act is that a US headquartered cloud vendor must hand over subpoenaed customer data even if the datacentre is outside the USA.

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/04...

[sterlind]

This is the rationale between sovereign clouds like Azure Germany, I think. In that case Microsoft provides the software and design, but the whole cloud is operated by EU citizens and no Americans have direct access. The idea being that Microsoft couldn't be compelled to hand over data because it has no access. I'm sure AWS (and maybe GCP) have such things by now.

Disclaimer: I work in Azure but not on this, so my info may be wrong.

[aarbor989]

This is totally irrelevant to the discussion but I found it amusing that the author of that articles name is Jim Halpert and actually very mildly looks like Jim Halpert

[captn3m0]

TIL. This is crazy

[FourthProtocol]

Indeed. This (CLOUD) of course runs counter to GDPR. Comply with one and fall foul of the other.

[patagurbon]

Do we have any evidence that a company has been forced into a situation like this yet? Where they've been required by the US to turn over data but prevented by the GDPR? I feel like that would've been big news, but surely it's happened already.

[tonyarkles]

The joy of NSLs is that you’re not allowed to talk about them. I have no idea what it would look like, but I imagine there would be nervous lawyers talking to both the US DoJ and their local privacy commissioner, quietly trying to find some solution that doesn’t involve the executives going to jail when setting foot in the US.

[setr]

I think its more of the rebranding from US-gov spying to Chinese-gov spying

[thephyber]

Agree. I'm curious if it becoming a US-owned app means it would struggle in China.

[lvturner]

In China they have a separate app owned by ByteDance called Douyin - in fact iirc TikTok was an aquisition that they then modeled after Douyin

[lambdasquirrel]

I'm not sure it would, unless the app development were to be significantly different. People sometimes underestimate the cultural differences.

The example I like to give is the one given by John Hooker, who taught comparative culture at CMU. As it is, U.S. jokes are often not funny to many continental Europeans. Chinese humor is of a whole other bent.

Another interesting comparison point are Japanese websites, which are borderline unnavigable (to me) because they avoid any use of larger fonts.