- This applies to any company, doesn't it?
Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply.
"I will never give up customer data" is a very tough promise to keep, if the government threatens you with your business license being revoked, your servers and domains being forcibly seized by the police, and you personally going to jail.
(Under the current US administration, we can add "A close examination of the immigration status of all foreign nationals employed by your company, followed by probable deportation or jail" to the list of potential consequences for resisting the government.)
by throwawayffffas
1 subcomments
- > Carniaux did say that the situation had never arisen.
That's what he would say if the company was under a gag order in the US. So I would take anything they say with a mountain of salt.
- An inevitable consequence of this administration destroying US foreign influence and power at an unprecedented rate is that (IMHO) it is inevitable that the EU builds their own cloud and mandates its use for EU data. It is becoming a matter of national security.
The interesting thing is that the US is acting in the exact way that they accuse China of acting. Companies like Huawei are forbidden from installing telecom infrastructure for "national security" reasons [1]. One of justifications for first banning then forcing a sale of Tiktok was because of possible Chinese government interference. It's only a matter of time before the EU and China start making the same determination against US tech giants (eg Meta executive brags about silencing dissent [2]).
This administration really is killing the golden goose.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-e...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eO8byuv6PE
- But then who can? No global cloud providers, including Hetzner and OVH, are free from CLOUD act because they have US presence[1].
1. https://us.ovhcloud.com/legal/faqs/cloud-act/
by emodendroket
1 subcomments
- A bit of a "hoist by their own petard" situation since the US has been raising this specter about Chinese tech for quite some time.
- The whole concept of big cloud somehow setting up sovereign clouds in Europe seems incredibly naive to me.
Every AWS employee knows where his bread is buttered - Seattle not Brussels
by varispeed
1 subcomments
- Governments are not exempt from Cloud Act and US providers can be under gag order, so from EU or UK government perspective, they will never know if data has been accessed by 3rd country and what happened to it.
This is actually amazing that all the tenders have not been rejected under national security grounds or simply security services (yet again) have not done the job tax payers pay them to do.
by penguin_booze
0 subcomment
- > U.S. companies can be forced to hand over data, regardless of where it is stored
s/U.S./Chinese/
Tomato <=> Tomato
- Luckily we have great European cloud companies like UpCloud https://upcloud.com
- This is known. The problem is that the EU is hooked on us technology. I don’t see this untangling soon which is a big strategic weakness
by giuliomagnifico
0 subcomment
- It’s an old new (July 22)
- Anyone who's read the law has known this for years.
The GDPR is incompatible with the Cloud Act, and so the only legal (or so it should be) way to use US companies is to treat them like unsafe third countries - no matter the data center location.
But everyone wants to continue like before. Having to ensure that Amazon and Azure never touches unincrypted personal data is hard. So one "compromise" after another has been tried - never solving the actual problem.
As a EU citizen I think it's entirely embarrassing. Either the EU should have the power to force European subsidiaries to be exempted from the cloud act, or everyone should be forced to abide the law, which would greatly boost EU tech. Instead we are just rolling over.
by schuyler2d
1 subcomments
- I can't imagine the Cloud Act being effective without Microsoft (and French gov) complicity.
If they can make successful tax shelters they can architect the entities and the architecture to remove this option.
There's some 9-eyes thing where this is a feature not a bug
by 1123581321
3 subcomments
- I wouldn't think "sovereign" EU data would be protected from US snooping either, unless the Five Eyes Plus alliance is going to be dissolved. Even then...
by thinkindie
0 subcomment
- I wonder why people are surprised, as this is an open secret nobody is willing to admit. And it's basically the reason we had Schrim I and Schrim II.
At the same time a massive migration from US cloud in EU to EU cloud would be a massive pain for a lot of companies in the EU.
- Of course they can’t. U.S. companies are under U.S. jurisdiction, no matter where their data centers are located.
- US cloud act is definitely an overreach. Suddenly private infrastructure is now an extension of the government surveillance complex. This is the equivalent of the govt being able to put a camera on your building because they want to observe the public/private area around it.
by Agingcoder
1 subcomments
- Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway, with my keys ? If the crypto is strong enough then surely cloud providers can’t do anything with it ?
- after this whopping great vulnerability in Azure, anything there prior to that being fixed should be considered public anyway:
https://dirkjanm.io/obtaining-global-admin-in-every-entra-id...
- Another take: Microsoft admitted under oath in France that the US government doesn't care enough about French data to ever have requested any.
I'm sure if you asked the current administration what they think of France, they'd reply, "all they do is wine!"
by shevy-java
3 subcomments
- Time to pull away all EU data from the Trump USA.
- What difference, at this point, does it make? The EU has already surrendered any notion of sovereignty to the US in the fields of military and energy.
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