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I don't think that Facebook needs to address the fear in people from leaving Europe. If nothing else, they've definitely heard feedback that people wouldn't min

• justapassenger 5y ago
  > Yeah.. The reality is you don't really have to transfer anything out of EU in order to keep your service running. Liars Can you explain to me how would you allow communication between EU and USA users without transferring any data out of EU? Expect for putting all the datacenters in EU?
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure when we talk about "transfers" here, we aren't talking about "user in US requests data from URL that is served from server in EU". We're talking about user-data from/about/on EU citizens that is stored on servers in the US (or transferred there from servers in the EU with the intent to keep it on servers in the US). The former is fine[0], but the latter is not. [0] Obviously if there is some web forum hosted in Germany that a bunch of Germans living in Germany post to, and I -- in the US -- visit the forum, that involves data leaving Germany and flowing to the US. There's nothing wrong with that.
    • justapassenger 5y ago
      Very simple example - I'm in EU, and I like and post a comment on a photo of Rihana. How do you do that on the backend, without transferring data or keeping all the data in EU? Even if you keep data for individual profile in corresponding country, any interaction with a content outside of EU is impossible without data transfer.
  • b112 5y ago
    When Facebook's size, db backends are sharded. When someone looks at a page, any page, queries are hitting a number of sharded backends.
• gowld 5y ago
  Do you really think that FB's >100million users in Europe don't want to use Facebook?
  • marksmith2996 5y ago
    Yes
    • andylei 5y ago
      i mean, then they wouldn't?
      • wizzwizz4 5y ago
        https://principiadiscordia.com/book/45.php https://principiadiscordia.com/book/45.php > WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO? > "But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it." > OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
  • dleslie 5y ago
    Anecdotally, I would love to stop using Messenger and WhatsApp; however, the social friction in doing so is too great. Far too many friends and family are using those services exclusively for me to abandon them. If those services suddenly closed then I wouldn't have to use them! It's silly, really; in order to contact specific people I must use all of: SMS, Email, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Discord.
  • dont__panic 5y ago
    I'm sure a good chunk would be fine with it. Facebook only maintains their social media dominance because the product is sticky: when your friends, family, municipality, favorite businesses, and clubs use Facebook and only Facebook for announcements, you kind of have no choice but to participate unless you're willing to work around inconveniences. Most users barely log in, maybe once or twice a month to check their direct messages and waste a few minutes on the feed. It's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma: if other people use Facebook, they get to see things you don't and have an advantage in some domains. So a lot of people "use" facebook. But if all of the businesses and groups get forced off of Facebook they'll just find another way to make announcments. Same thing with car ownership: if everyone stopped owning cars, everyone could happily get around with bikes, feet, and public transit. The world would quickly restructure to accommodate it. Sure, some things would be lost (it would be harder to go to remote places to hike, for instance), but other things, like the ease of getting around your immediate neighborhood, or easy access to stores, or polluting the air with less CO2, would balance that out in many ways.
• pokepim 5y ago
  It’s not for people, it’s for the investors
• jefftk 5y ago
  > you don't really have to transfer anything out of EU in order to keep your service running If a user in Florida tries to view a post by a user in Germany, doesn't the German user's data have to leave the EU?
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    Yes (and this is fine - because you're sharing that post with a certain audience). But the issue is all the metadata that comes and goes with it.
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      Right, the people at Meta aren't stupid. They understand fully will that users posts aren't the issue, but steering the debate in that direction would make the EU look unreasonable. Meta could be more accommodating to the wishes of the EU and place a greater focus on privacy, but that would mean changing how they do business. Meta clearly don't believe that it's possibly for their businesses to be profitable without data mining the crap out of their users. I know it's not a popular opinion, but business like Facebook and Instagram are the direct reason why the EU feel the need to step in and regulate.
  • ratg13 5y ago
    Data on the internet always travels all over the globe. It's where the data is stored and kept that is at issue.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      Inherently isn’t the data stored and kept everywhere it’s accessed? If you’re in Germany and are a German your message sent to me just now also now is being stored where I’m located to even read it, no?
      • 0des 5y ago
        That is correct, as well as caching.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > Yeah.. The reality is you don't really have to transfer anything out of EU in order to keep your service running. Liars Only as long as your users are fine to only talk with people from their "world region cluster". Everyone else would not be able to communicate with, say, family that lives overseas.
• onphonenow 5y ago
  "Yeah.. The reality is you don't really have to transfer anything out of EU in order to keep your service running. Liars" - nixass Look, I realize I'm not an elite hacker news hacker, but how can I as a US user look at my friends posts in germany without them transferring data to me in the US? What makes this so obviously a lie that such strong language is called for?
  • trasz 5y ago
    Transferring data to you in the US is fine. What isn't fine is storing EU user's data in the US, or any other country that refuses to protect them.
• bdonlan 5y ago
  > The reality is you don't really have to transfer anything out of EU in order to keep your service running. Practically speaking, running FB in a way that doesn't transfer anything out of the EU would involve either: 1. Siloing off the EU facebook, with no contact with the US side or 2. Building a federated facebook, which transfers across e.g. only the timeline entries US friends are granted view access to The former would not be well-accepted, as it would cut off communication from e.g. international relatives, and would be a rather large project to launch. The latter would be an even bigger rearchitecture, which would likely take, at a minimum, several years to complete, since it's unlikely this was ever anticipated as being a possibility when FB was originally created. So, I sympathize with them - while in the long term they might be able to find a solution, in the short-to-medium term, FB would have no choice to stop operating.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • barbazoo 5y ago
    If that were the case, how would any global communication medium be allowed to operate? Can't you provide the same service while not moving PII out of the EU? As far as I know this is not about a user in the US viewing a EU citizen's facebook page, this is about where the original data resides, is it not? Playing devil's advocate here, can't you just figure out what jurisdiction the user belongs to and route the request to the right server?
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • emaginniss 5y ago
      A facebook feed doesn't just show data from one user. When I look at my feed, I am seeing posts from 100 people distributed over 7 countries on 3 continents. Stitching that data together from multiple data sources is an extremely difficult thing to accomplish.
• kache_ 5y ago
  Large computer systems with baked in assumptions of the fact that data locality regulations wouldn't be as strict as they are in 2022 are... difficult to update
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    Facebook will figure it out
• hashtag-til 5y ago
  Would be really great to see even more regulation to make these so-called “data businesses” to stop gambling with people’s information. One example of that would a mandatory paid option which takes you out of all company data sharing stuff. I dont use any facebook/Meta related platforms such as facebook, instagram or whatsapp. But it makes me sick seeing people around me addicted to it, due to their shady operation patterns.
• stingraycharles 5y ago
  About 5 years ago, I was told Facebook uses a single global “write” datacenter, which works for their use case of read-mostly. I’m not sure it this is still the case, but assuming it is, wouldn’t that make for a reasonable argument why it would be “impossible” (a.k.a. possible but non-trivial) to keep the data in the EU?
  • Cederfjard 5y ago
    Yeah I remember something similar. It’s not just about coming up with a compliant architecture, but how to get there from what already exists. Of course authorities could say ”not our problem”.
• xtracto 5y ago
  I live in Mexico and have several friends in different EU countries. Would it be possible for me to follow them , read their feeds and interact normally if I was in the US and Facebook blocked data transfers between EU/US?
• KaiserPro 5y ago
  > The reality is you don't really have to transfer anything out of EU in order to keep your service running. Liars Ok you would have to make actual legal guarantees that no PII data will _ever_ be processed outside of the EU. given that this effectively means that if you fly out of the EU, or are _routed_ out of the EU, you won't be able to use those services. This is because PII is anything personal to you, and processing means anything that makes decisions, like routing based on IP or username. This isn't actually a facebook specific problem S3/azure/google and their customers all have the same problem. but of course yah boo facebook.