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I know that a lot of people's reaction to this might be, "screw Facebook", but the ramification might be "entrench Facebook such that no one can compete with th
by mdasen 5y ago
I know that a lot of people's reaction to this might be, "screw Facebook", but the ramification might be "entrench Facebook such that no one can compete with them."
If the Irish data regulator enforces the provisional order, it would effectively end the privileged access companies in the US have to personal data from Europe and put them on the same footing as companies in other nations outside the bloc.
This isn't just about Facebook. This is about whether every small company trying to bootstrap itself needs to take large steps to architect their data storage in a way that allows for segregation between European and American data.
For Facebook, this might be costly and annoying to deal with. But what if you want to launch a new Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Airbnb, recipe website, etc.? You're a team of 2-4 trying to get things off the ground. Do you need to make sure that you are unavailable in the EU? Do you need to work on splitting data storage before you even find product-market-fit?
Like, Airbnb certainly hosts lots of data about people and places, but when they were just starting out and trying to get traction, it seems like it would be a big hurdle to comply with this.
Facebook can comply with this. I think it would be a big burden on anyone trying to compete with Facebook going forward or the ability of new companies to get off the ground.
- laurent92 5y agoIt was quite easy, in my software, to have a settings with “data storage location” EU/US/Asia, and we transfer the data over to the country of their choice, with a little downtime. Granted there is a main database with everyone’s key/auth/chosen database, but that’s the only centralized data.
- edoceo 5y ago> team of 2-4 It seems you'd have loads of other hurdles to get over before intl-data becomes the thing that would block your growth. My 4 person team solves with country specific domains and hosting. Before that we had to figure out how to be profitable and "default alive" which was orders of magnitude harder than data silos.
- worewood 5y agoYeah agree with you. I don't see what the difficulty is. It is mostly an infrastructure issue and if you're starting from zero you're going cloud anyways
- ramblerman 5y agoYou are assuming every company immediately needs to serve the "whole" world. This regulation might actually make EU startups serving the EU more competitive vs competition from Silicon Valley. Which would be a double win for the EU legislators.
- akarma 5y agoA social startup only being available in a certain country would be a substantial hindrance to adoption in most cases.
- latk 5y agoEvery EU company has been having these compliance problems since the Privacy Shield invalidation in last year's Schrems II judgement. It is only Facebook that had the lawyers (and the gall) to sue the Irish DPC to prevent them from enforcing this judgement. Other authorities have already started enforcing, for example a small Bavarian company got a slap on the wrist for having used MailChimp. But yes, the EU regulatory environment is definitely making it more difficult to cheaply trial some business idea. GDPR isn't part of the problem. By unifying EU data protection law it has become easier to target the EU as a whole. My gripe is more with things like the upcoming copyright directive which is a de-facto link tax.