[VikingCoder]

I am so delighted I am able to access blog posts from people in Russia or Iran or China. Otherwise, it would be far easier for human rights abuses to exist. (This is somewhat tongue in cheek. My point is that information wants to be free, and we're all better off if there's LESS friction.)

When I found out Parler was being hosted on Russian servers, I immediately informed everyone I knew who was thinking about switching to Parler that it was a really bad idea. And it's their choice whether to use Parler or not.

I think it's great if companies can't hide that they're doing something like routing data through Russia. I think it's pretty stupid to not let someone use a product that routes data through Russia.

I also think that if Facebook stands up servers in France, it'll still be just as problematic as it is today.

[Pako]

This sounds really americentric. Have you considered that the every non-US citizen'd PII is fair game for US companies one in the county? As a European I wouldn't want my stuff to be routed through the US the same way you don't want your data going through Russia.

[javajosh]

Yeah, it sucks that the US doesn't respect non-citizen data. But TBH I really don't think it respects citizen data either. Consider that Snowden discovered all kinds of ways the CIA and NSA were hoovering up data, in defiance of the law. But did the American people get pissed and force a change in those agencies, and call the leadership to account for disregarding the law because it was convenient? No: they successfully demonized the whistleblower who is still on the run. (Although I will say that excessive snoopiness is a lesser evil than censorship).

In the end, though, there is a high-tech solution here, and that's to migrate to 100% asymmetrically encrypted messaging, at the application level, regardless of underlying transport. This would force nation states to risk large scale hacking of devices, but that's more visible and easier to combat, as long as we remain free to make (and buy) the compute hardware we want to make.

[salawat]

The U.S. doesn't even respect Citizen@s data half the time. Remember, the Courts ruled that expectation of privacy, and therefore 4th Amendment protections are waived as soon as you engage with a Third Party.

[dwild]

> This sounds really americentric

His whole comment was about how he want to let traffic route through Russia even though he doesn't like it... but it's really Americentric? Could you explain that point please?