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I suspect cases like this are a tiny minority. You could handle them by falling back to the current way of doing this, ie US servers, and still protect the vas
by trasz 5y ago
I suspect cases like this are a tiny minority. You could handle them by falling back to the current way of doing this, ie US servers, and still protect the vast majority of data that's not related to US citizens.
- pjc50 5y agoA tiny minority of Facebook users is millions of people. Lots of people have international family and friends. A fallback approach is infeasible for legal requirements, unless it's there for appealing the fine to a lower value. The question is potentially very difficult, and could only be resolved by constructive engagement with the party making the rules. Don't forget what happens when people travel.
- peoplefromibiza 5y agomany more people have friends and family in the US, but are not allowed to enter the country freely. Borders are heavily controlled by USA, why shouldn't other countries to the same?
- trasz 5y agoThe question can be solved trivially easily by just using a big-hammer approach of banning any transfer of personal information to US, period. There are no reasons for allowing the transfer to happen, other than making it easier for Facebook to make money. FB would implement it by only storing interactions involving any EU nationals in EU. We do want to make it easier for Facebook for political reasons, though, and it's still not particularly hard: just declare that only the data/conversations involving US citizens can be stored on US servers.
- bryan_w 5y agoAre you saying that an American shouldn't be able to pull up the profile of an EU user? Seems a bit extreme.
- trasz 5y agoOf course not; the data would come from FB's EU servers. The "transfer" above applies to where the data is stored, not where it can be accessed from. From the users point of view the only change would be... nothing; the latency is already at the point where it wouldn't incur any observable penalty.
- ConceptJunkie 5y agoI don't have many Facebook friends, but they include people on at least 3 other continents. I'm sure a lot of folks have at least some friends in other countries.
- messe 5y ago> I suspect cases like this are a tiny minority. Knowing people in other countries is a tiny minority? Maybe in the US, given its size, but it's pretty widespread and normal in Europe.
- stingraycharles 5y agoI think you’d be surprised that HN is not representative for the general population, and that talking with people from another continent over WhatsApp is, in fact, an exception and not the rule.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago> Knowing people in other countries is a tiny minority? Absolutely yes. Especially across two continents. Europeans who have friends from Europe would all be in Europe anyway. Europe is larger than US btw, it has two times the population. Russia+Turkey+Germany alone account for 95% of the population of the United States.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jltsiren 5y agoI would assume that most Europeans know people living on another continent, or at least people who have lived there in the recent past. There are plenty of careers and hobbies where you make international connections, plenty of jobs that require you to live somewhere else for a while, and plenty of people looking for opportunities elsewhere. Globally, around 1 person in 30 lives outside their country of origin, so knowing people in other countries should be common.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago> I would assume that most Europeans know people living on another continent Not most, just some. 1 out of 30 is a bit more than 3% and many of those have family connections, they are not strangers living abroad, they are - for example - Italians living in Canada. EU citizens whose data should be kept in EU.