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Fun fact: because of German paranoia, MS offers Office 365 Deutschland, which is mostly identical with Office 365 but operated by T-Systems (a German company no

by pluma 8y ago

Fun fact: because of German paranoia, MS offers Office 365 Deutschland, which is mostly identical with Office 365 but operated by T-Systems (a German company not directly affiliated with Microsoft) and hosted in Germany. It's obvious why Google wouldn't be interested in a similar model for their products.

jiveturkey 8y ago
your use of “paranoia” implies that the choice is a bad one. quite the opposite, IMHO.
- pluma 8y ago
  You could just call it "privacy sensitivity" but by international standards Germans tend to be more "paranoid" when it comes to protecting their data. The reason I'm using the phrase is mostly that it's not always entirely rational (e.g. the outrage about Google Street View was at times a bit absurd). The development is certainly positive and the GDPR is also very similar to pre-existing German privacy laws in many aspects, so I'm not complaining.
chopin 8y ago
With the CLOUD act, this decision makes sense to me. Could you elaborate where the paranoia lies?
usr1106 8y ago
> MS offers Office 365 Deutschland, which is mostly identical with Office 365 but operated by T-Systems AWS recently wrote me an email, that because my billing address is in the EU, my contract has been transferred to a newly founded company AWS EU, which in turn has subsidiaries in most EU countries. I have no significant business with AWS and have not investigated what this all means. But I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon sees the risk that with the current US administration they don't want to rely on international business anymore. Having only national (or intra-EU) contracts with their EU customers seems just the safer option. Dealing with investments and profits inside a group of fully owned subsidiaries is probably much easier than dealing with two fundamentally different systems in every single customer contract. The EU striving for data-protection and the US insisting that foreigners have no rights and international treaties are bad unless they unilaterally favor the US.
- pluma 8y ago
  An important distinction is that T-Systems (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) is not a subsidiary of Microsoft. AWS EU on the other hand is presumably still a subsidiary of the American Amazon Web Services Inc the same way Amazon EU S.à.r.l. is a subsidiary of Amazon proper. Since AWS EU presumably shares the same infrastructure as AWS US it's probably more of an accounting trick (but keep in mind any GDPR fines would apply to the entire group, not just the individual corporation, so it's not really a financial protection).

by pluma 8y ago

jiveturkey 8y ago

your use of “paranoia” implies that the choice is a bad one. quite the opposite, IMHO.

pluma 8y ago
You could just call it "privacy sensitivity" but by international standards Germans tend to be more "paranoid" when it comes to protecting their data. The reason I'm using the phrase is mostly that it's not always entirely rational (e.g. the outrage about Google Street View was at times a bit absurd). The development is certainly positive and the GDPR is also very similar to pre-existing German privacy laws in many aspects, so I'm not complaining.

chopin 8y ago

With the CLOUD act, this decision makes sense to me. Could you elaborate where the paranoia lies?

usr1106 8y ago

> MS offers Office 365 Deutschland, which is mostly identical with Office 365 but operated by T-Systems AWS recently wrote me an email, that because my billing address is in the EU, my contract has been transferred to a newly founded company AWS EU, which in turn has subsidiaries in most EU countries. I have no significant business with AWS and have not investigated what this all means. But I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon sees the risk that with the current US administration they don't want to rely on international business anymore. Having only national (or intra-EU) contracts with their EU customers seems just the safer option. Dealing with investments and profits inside a group of fully owned subsidiaries is probably much easier than dealing with two fundamentally different systems in every single customer contract. The EU striving for data-protection and the US insisting that foreigners have no rights and international treaties are bad unless they unilaterally favor the US.

pluma 8y ago
An important distinction is that T-Systems (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) is not a subsidiary of Microsoft. AWS EU on the other hand is presumably still a subsidiary of the American Amazon Web Services Inc the same way Amazon EU S.à.r.l. is a subsidiary of Amazon proper. Since AWS EU presumably shares the same infrastructure as AWS US it's probably more of an accounting trick (but keep in mind any GDPR fines would apply to the entire group, not just the individual corporation, so it's not really a financial protection).