[EnKopVand]

I spent a decade working with digitalisation in the public sector in Denmark and I doubt this will change a thing considering a executive order is too risky to rely on.

I'm a little torn on the issue because I value privacy, but currently we have a nice scandal going here in my country, which is essentially the former top intelligence boss of the military secret police, or whatever you'd call it in English, being accused of leaking state secrets. What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way.

While the bureaucrats and lawyers discuss this, both the public and private sector suffers the financial consequences. We recently had a smaller scandal, where a town was told they couldn't use their chromebooks, or their google education setup, for this years schooling. Essentially making it impossible for that city to teach, because so much of their setup relied on google education and they only had a month to find an alternative. You can argue privacy over this, but it's sort of weird that one city, out of 30+ cities, were banned from using these tools while the others weren't, and that they were banned from it because they fucked up their documentation. I'm not going to defend google, but really, in this case we're hurting the education of thousands of children over something silly. Because the alternative to google education isn't going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn't exist, it's going to be Microsoft and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world issue.

There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in a worse alternative?

I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it's done in secret. But an executive order isn't really going to help us, because who knows what the next American government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.

[klabb3]

> What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way.

Yeah :/ Unless I hear otherwise, I'm assuming this order has little to offer individuals and is instead a big business & government treaty. Governments (including our European ones) keeps their mass surveillance and American mega-corporations get the business contracts, all covered in PR of increased individual privacy.

Since it's an executive order, it also wouldn't surprise me if there's a hidden payload relating to increased US surveillance due to the war. I may sound cynical but every leak about the intelligence apparatus has proven even me naive.

[jacooper]

> I'm not going to defend google, but really, in this case we're hurting the education of thousands of children over something silly. Because the alternative to google education isn't going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn't exist, it's going to be Microsoft and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world issue.

Nextcloud exists, and it can serve a school just fine.

In fact The EU is partnering with NextCloud to get rid of Office 365(1)

Nextcloud is not fully there yet, but the only way to push it to compete is to support local alternatives by giving them an advantage.

Even though I still think Nextcloud is being held back by technical decisions(PHP and its slowness and

It feeling janky)

> There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in a worse alternative?

OVH is literally the fifth biggest internet hosting provider, and Hetzner is 6th according W3techs(2)

> I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it's done in secret. But an executive order isn't really going to help us, because who knows what the next American government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.

This is a specific case to Denmark, when looking at Europe in general the legal requirement (and some times bans) of Google analytics created GDPR friendly alternatives like Plausible.io and Posthog.

And you can see the same thing with Nextcloud or EU hosting and many other things.

Things take time, and result are starting to show up.

2. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/data_center

1. https://nextcloud.com/blog/european-governments-work-with-ne...

[EnKopVand]

Next cloud doesn’t come with the chromebooks, or the educational tools that we’ve already paid for though.

I think you have to look at it from a bigger picture. We could technically use Linux, next cloud and something not office365, but who would operate and maintain it? Almost none of the IT staff in the public sector (or in my case the entire country) knows how to operate these things, and a major part of them don’t want to learn because they can just leave for a better paying job with AWS or Azure in the private sector. The teachers and other employees know how to use office365 and Google education because they have used it all their lives. The developers making the education software similarly know how to do so on these platforms.

I get that someone needs to make the first move, but if it’s going to be done this way, where the schools themselves are punished for decisions they don’t make. Which is essentially what happens when a city is told it cannot use the chromebooks it has already bought or the educational plans that they have laid out for the year. So in order to protect the educational data from google (again, only in the one city that fucked up their paperwork and not all the other cities using google education or chromebooks) that city is going to have at least a year or schooling broken, and will have to find the money to pay for new options. Money that means even less teachers.

If you can think of a faster way to lose public support for the GDPR in general than that, then I’d applaud you, because I sure can’t.

Mean while, the same data protection agency that banned the chromebooks removed the option from parents to avoid having institutions upload photos of their children to a national app run in AWS.

Or in other words, if the legalisation thinks it can move the EU forward through punishments, then I think the EU is going to wake up without member states because nobody is going to want to pay for it with nurses and teachers.

[aborsy]

nextcloud leaves plenty to be desired even for home use. Slow, bloated, buggy, etc.

And at the end it’s just access to the files, that a samba share does too, with native OS applications.