10 ms·

The era of borderless data is ending

97 points by lxm 4y ago

andsoitis 4y ago
> control data produced within their perimeters societies, and our regulatory frameworks, need to move beyond the idea that "data is produced and resides within a particular geo". Not only is it not, it is also holding us back from leaping forward / bootstrapping into the beyond-meatspace.
- lazide 4y ago
  Good luck with that when if you’re going to be prosecuted for a felony or not depends on said meatspace location.
- ddingus 4y ago
  Take their point of view: why do they need to do any of those things? What is in it for them?
  - FredPret 4y ago
    Here's the opposite point of view: if the bulk of value is created in the ether, why are they relevant at all? All a rich nerd needs is a protection from criminals - whether paid for publicly or privately.
    - ddingus 4y ago
      The question I posed may speak to how it may be possible to get these entities to move toward a more preferable world view. A rich nerd needs more than criminal protection, BTW. Just a few basics: Without the machinery of society running well, wealth becomes quite burdensome. The nerd needs said wealth recognized, means to transact, enforce contracts, currency to trade with, and all that depends on courts and governments of some kind. And there is more. I just sort of stopped. There will be value in the "ether", but it will also intersect real space and there is the relevance. Talking about this is sort of like those free energy machine discussions where everyone excited about the machine potential forgets about the initial energy input and how entropy will bleed it away however slowly. Wealthy nerds do not just appear and create in a vacuum. And no judgement on the idealized nerd being discussed. Could be a wealthy anyone! A poor nerd needs the same protection as well as the means to do all the basic human stuff needed to exist and practice nerdery. (I laughed at that being a defined word) In terms of being a nerd and creating ethereal value, it looks to me like assuming wealth just makes it considerably easier to ignore where this stuff meets up with reality, a lot like some free energy machine presentations end up compelling enough to sideline the initial energy input...
      - FredPret 4y ago
        Fair points all. I meant my comment mostly in terms of negotiation. Rich nerds don't pop into existence out of a vacuum, but now that we exist, we can move to the country that suits each of us best and do the same work with roughly similar incomes. Yes, we still need the common infrastructure, but for the most part, I need a fast internet connection and a lack of bullets coming my way. This drastically reduces the hold any one country has over me, which is what allowed me to wave goodbye to my country of birth and move to a country where I like the tax/spend pattern more (Canada). Theoretically, one could site all earning, investing, and banking in some tax haven and just use a credit card to transact. We'll still need countries, but they will be more like regular infrastructure providers (civilization as a service?).
        ddingus 4y ago
        "for the most part" Let's talk about farmers and fields for a moment: Early on in human history, the first farmers began their work with fertile ground. Mistakes were made, understanding gained, improvements were also made. And this is just humans being humans. Over time, it was observed the earth can become parched when farmed too many times without putting some of the yields back into the soil. There are no free lunches. Every so often, it is necessary to invest in the earth so that it remains fertile and yields bountiful. Farmers, having once learned this, continued to do it, and everyone is living in relative harmony. Along comes big Ag. Good yields are not good enough. They want the maximum, and they ignore history and proceed to max the ground out, and of course it becomes parched. Rather than invest in the maintenance of fertile ground, which requires some crops be grown to be turned back into earth, they treat the ground chemically and continue. And now there is a top soil problem where there was once fertile ground. And so they basically mooch top soil from somewhere else, and on it goes. Turns out those high yields are quite expensive for everyone else! Now, let's look at what you say you need: For example, what gives that fast Internet connection value? A wealthy society in which to derive that income! This is fertile ground. See where I am going with this? What happens when that wealthy society is not maintained? In other words, what happens when the ground becomes parched? Bullets, among many other things like it being harder to get that income due to lower demand as greater numbers of people struggle due to growing economic problems and those are generally due to labor not paying what it costs for people to actually exist and show up for work and perform that labor, and also generally due to debt accumulation in the form of "parched" societies in serious need of reinvestment. It's great to maximize it for you, thinking of only your considerations as if the rest of the world just comes gratis. It doesn't you know. Really, this is all no different from the farmer who does not see the need to reinvest in their ground. What they do is get all they can and when that ground becomes parched, they call it someone else's problem and move to new, fertile ground where they wash, rinse, repeat, until they have a lot of wealth accumulated and have left behind a lot of parched ground for others to restore to being fertile, and doing that isn't cheap!! That farmer could have invested in their ground, still could have accumulated considerable wealth, but would not be costing everyone around them very large sums of money while doing it. Nobody exists in a vacuum. Everything costs something. And if you are not paying it, someone else is forced to, and or where it's not paid, other costs and risks, such as bullets, tend to follow soon after. That's it. Ideally some food for thought regarding "needs" being far greater than the idealized picture you put here.
- enasterosophes 4y ago
  We did move beyond it, and what we got for it was covert operations infiltrating social media to influence national elections, along with various large organizations suffering ransomware and other hacking over the last few years. Even if you could go back to the wild west days of the 90s, most people these days would just complain about how people could go ahead and say whatever they wanted without being cancelled. We started with the dream you're referring to, and it couldn't stand up to the crappiness of reality.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
- bitwize 4y ago
  Yeah, we said that in the 90s too, that was the thesis of high-minded bullshit from the era like the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace". Look where it got us. There is no sphere that is outside the government's control. None. Create one, and the government will come round to enforce its will on it.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Copyrights, patents, censorship and other kinds of monopolies on information are to human civilization as plaques are to an Alzheimer's-afflicted brain.
  - yardstick 4y ago
    Copyrights and patents are quite different to censorship. Copyrights and parents provide assurances that spending large sums of money (millions/billions) to create new technology won’t be in vain. There are issues with both (too long copyright, patent trolls, obvious patents) but they are better than not having any protections. Why would anyone make a movie or game if it’s going to be almost exclusively pirated? Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc? Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Good will only goes so far. You’d only do it if the budget (risk) was peanuts, and unfortunately innovation needs money. People need a roof over their head and food on the table. Which would leave only rich governments with the means to fund such advancements, and their ideology often won’t be aligned to such endeavours.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      > they are better than not having any protections. People keep saying that, but no one comes up with any data to back up the assertion. > Why would anyone make a movie or game if it’s going to be almost exclusively pirated? Because they like it? See: 0AD, Nexuiz, Battle of Wesnoth. > Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc? I read someone posing this question and proposing the answer that yes, patrons are going to crowdfund what they want to see. > Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Good will only goes so far. Wait a minute: > they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Lack of protection is not connected to lack of remuneration. US government spends millions/billions to get data from the outer space, despite that data not being protected. > innovation needs money Makes me wonder how the innovation of money came about before there was money to spur innovation.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Reality is going to rudely awaken you in the not so distant future if that’s the way you think the tide is turning.
- gjvnq 4y ago
  For this to happen, we would need all the world to have compatible laws. Doing that without eroding national sovereignty is essentially impossible. We would need something like the European Union for all of humanity. And even the somewhat limited powers delegated to the EU were enough to cause serious backslash as we have seen during Brexit.
enasterosophes 4y ago
While it's disappointing, it's not exactly a surprise. Doctorow's been talking about "the war on general computation" for years. For about the same length of time, I've been saying that governments would eventually seek a monopoly over computation in the same way as they currently hold a monopoly over violence: it doesn't disappear or become physically impossible, but it requires registration, licensing and reporting, along with suitable punishments to deter those who would seek to usurp the monopoly.
- Proven 4y ago
  Yes, except that Doctorow has been promoting "the war on general computation" for years. Who's waging that war if not the State? Who has been calling for ever more regulation and (therefore) Big Government if not Doctorow? One has to be a fool to think that giving more power to the government will result in more freedom.
- potamic 4y ago
  When I learn about revolutions played out across the world, the recurring outcome seems to be measures to ensure citizens are not denied the means to usurp authority. Great men of the past seem to have concluded that the fundamental problem in any society is that power corrupts and the solution to a sane society is to provide citizens the means to put power in check. Just as freedom of speech, right to assemble or right to bear arms gives people the means to challenge authority, computation will be tomorrow's weapon of choice. More and more societal functions will rely on computation and those who have the means to compute will hold power. Data regulations might have good intentions, but it's a road to hell that will eventually deny citizens the right to "compute" and keep the balance of power titled.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
As a privacy geek… good.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  As a fellow privacy geek, I'd rather the laws applied universally rather than be split at the borders. Alas, it's the lesser evil.
  - orwin 4y ago
    The industry had a chance to self regulate. Multiple chances even. It just doesn't work.
    - bzzzt 4y ago
      Not a CEO in the world will exit a profitable legal business and not get fired. Besides, the US also had multiple opportunities to fix their spying laws to give EU countries assurance their citizens data would be protected but actively chooses not to.
- jokoon 4y ago
  Yes, that's a bit what GDPR is about, so that's a good thing.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  if you think this has anything to do with privacy, I've got another bridge to sell you
timenova 4y ago
I have a genuine question about this. How are we supposed to isolate user data stored in, say Postgres, by region, and still do multi-region replication, and restoring correctly? And how is the application supposed to find which region a user's record is stored? For example, if the user's data is only supposed to be kept in the EU, and if the user tries to login connected to a US node, should the app forward the request to the EU node (and how would it know?), which then accesses the EU database? If all nodes are connected to all regional databases, does it even make a difference? Basically, I am very confused about regional separation of data while still running a single application.
- jbigelow76 4y ago
  I have a genuine question about this. How are we supposed to isolate user data stored in, say Postgres, by region, and still do multi-region replication, and restoring correctly? And how is the application supposed to find which region a user's record is stored? What part of your question is the concern of a bureaucrat? We can drop a couple 9s of uptime in the name of local data primacy right? (I specifically didn't say "data privacy") :)
  - timenova 4y ago
    I believe it'll lead to much higher costs, CO2 emissions, and other issues, simply because this architecture will require more message passing, wasted bandwidth, will be less reliable, and have higher operational complexity. I get that those in decision-making power aren't usually technologically adept at figuring out solutions for these issues, but they should invest in solutions first.
    - wmf 4y ago
      I would predict that data localization leads to data traveling shorter distances because most people access their local region rather than everything going to us-east-1.
- lstamour 4y ago
  In a very small number of cases, regional storage of data becomes regional restrictions. You see that already in how it's unlikely you will be able to access your consumer account from both Russia and the US at the same time unless you have a travel history to one or both countries. Similarly, an app storing data for EU citizens might indeed say, no, we can't share this data outside the EU, we're not allowed. How it figures out if you're outside a region is, of course, problematic. But that's rare. Generally the data lives on a regional server and gets accessed by a CDN in a region near where the data will be delivered. If you're allowed to sign in from that region, then you're likely authorizing transfer of data (for the duration of that session) to that same region. As for multi-region replication, it's often the case there are multiple regions in the same country - for example, us-east-1 and us-central-1. No jurisdictional problems to host the data in two regions in the same country, after all. As to how you look up what region the user's data is stored in, well, you can keep a list of users and regions. Worst case, force the user to remember their region, and use separate copies of the website (and DNS) to pick a region to sign in on. For example, the same app/website, but at different country domains.
kkfx 4y ago
A different point-of-view: on one side people and so some institutions who happen starting doing a very little part of their job start to wonder how "safe" is living on someone else computer-systems and want something "more local" under their control. On the other some wannabe dictatorships start to think that covering their back parts from others propaganda can be good for them. That's NOT at all the end of borderless data, it's just the beginning of the end of GAFAM dominion since most States in the world and few Citizens start to want their own systems under their own control. Witch is actually mostly VERY good, the not good part is censorship but the west world authorities can only remain silent since their own censorship on their own people from Assange to present censorship and mud machines of "third parties" subjects they dislike (no matter the reasons), the missed part is popular reaction that so far AFAIK is hyper low. My fellow HNers if we want, for good reasons, a homeserver with our data instead of someone else services that can be banned, changes overnight in unpleasant manner, ... why someone else should want differently? Does this means the end of borderless internet? IMVHO DEFINITIVELY NOT it means just the end of some hyper giant players witch can be observed elsewhere like the end of mega-ships, mega-planes, mega-projects etc or just the passage from mainframes to clusters. The negative part is that we still not get much freedom simply because ways to control us are so many that even dropping smartphones and IT giants accounts to the bin (witch means GAFAM in the west, Yandex in Russia, Tancent in China etc) does not change anything since now digital controls is done by private parties (the aforementioned giants) under States laws like digital payment push, social scoring etc witch is the actual real dangerous and disastrous thing. For that the real missed point is: people need a basic IT culture to understand because now IT is a basic component of our society and to be Citizens we need to know a bit our society OR we can only be subjects/parasites. Only with such basic culture people in sufficient mass would push against certain dangerous aspects ON TIME.
coldtea 4y ago
Thank god
eqvinox 4y ago
This article is conflating pushes to control and censor data with pushes to provide privacy rights. Those are very different things that just happen, because they are enacted along nation boundaries, to both create these borders. Providing privacy rights is very much not a "nation accelerating efforts to control data", and shame on the NYT for muddling this.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  If a government can create privacy directives (which is not the same as a privacy right; rights cannot be legislated), they can legislate prior restraint at a level way worse than the DMCA.
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    “rights cannot be legislated” How so?
    - leveraction 4y ago
      The basic idea is that rights are given by God, as opposed to privileges granted by the legislator. A legislator may grant or revoke privileges at any time. A legislator may not lawfully take away a right which it did not grant in the first place. At least that is the theory. In real life, the water gets pretty muddy. This is a very US perspective of course.
      - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        The can't be created, but legislation can certainly protect rights.
        User23 4y ago
        Privileges and immunities are the analog to rights that legislation can create.
      - 4y ago
jum1p 4y ago
"While the United States supports a free, unregulated approach that lets data zip between democratic nations unhindered, [...]" I think it's no secret that nations with the most market power were always for "free trade" and calling it so.
Jommi 4y ago
What if we put data servers in space?
- hiccuphippo 4y ago
  I remember gossip of The Pirate Bay people wanting to buy an unused offshore oil rig to obtain sovereignty. But the problem was, they needed to pay an ISP from some nearby country to get Internet access, making the project moot.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/Z2aVm https://archive.ph/Z2aVm http://web.archive.org/web/20220525122909/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/data-privacy-laws.html http://web.archive.org/web/20220525122909/https://www.nytime...
bhewes 4y ago
How I read this is now you need to put data servers in each country and follow the local rules related to data control. Says nothing about the insights you pull from the data. And the internet was built to withstand a nuclear war not some kind of utopia borderless data access.
ne0flex 4y ago
Recently, I've received an email from Google saying that my account was going to be switched over from Canada to US. I created my account in Canada and moved to the US 7 years ago. Google determined that since I mainly access my account from the US now that the "ownership" of my account should be transferred to Google US from Google Canada.
betwixthewires 4y ago
No it isn't. The era of borderless data for normal people who don't have time to learn new things is ending. Those of us that aren't interested in Facebook and twitter and wechat and whatever else are going to keep on trucking along with this "universal information availability" thing. We have Tor, VPNs, open source communication protocols, encryption, distributed and decentralized networks, free publishing and more.
rglullis 4y ago
Startup idea: mini-datacenters that can be installed in someone's basement or apartment building. Residents can run SOLID pods on these computers. Instead of user data going to the cloud, the cloud providers run their workloads directly on the user pods.
- wmf 4y ago
  Just use a regular data center.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Maybe I was too subtle. Let me fix it. As an user, do I really care whether my data is in the US, Germany or New Zealand, if all of Big Tech can exploit anyway? The only way for privacy is to have systems that never collect the data in the first place. A lot of the applications that we use today do not need to take your data to offer you functionality, but they could simply push their code to a computing environment controlled by the user, and run from there.
- anthropodie 4y ago
  Nope. No cloud providers. My data, my network, my choice how it becomes available to me when I'm away from my home. I don't want cloud in between.
bethecloud 4y ago
Decentralized cloud storage will keep data borderless

97 points by lxm 4y ago

> control data produced within their perimeters societies, and our regulatory frameworks, need to move beyond the idea that "data is produced and resides within a particular geo". Not only is it not, it is also holding us back from leaping forward / bootstrapping into the beyond-meatspace.

lazide 4y ago
Good luck with that when if you’re going to be prosecuted for a felony or not depends on said meatspace location.
ddingus 4y ago
Take their point of view: why do they need to do any of those things? What is in it for them?
- FredPret 4y ago
  Here's the opposite point of view: if the bulk of value is created in the ether, why are they relevant at all? All a rich nerd needs is a protection from criminals - whether paid for publicly or privately.
  - ddingus 4y ago
    The question I posed may speak to how it may be possible to get these entities to move toward a more preferable world view. A rich nerd needs more than criminal protection, BTW. Just a few basics: Without the machinery of society running well, wealth becomes quite burdensome. The nerd needs said wealth recognized, means to transact, enforce contracts, currency to trade with, and all that depends on courts and governments of some kind. And there is more. I just sort of stopped. There will be value in the "ether", but it will also intersect real space and there is the relevance. Talking about this is sort of like those free energy machine discussions where everyone excited about the machine potential forgets about the initial energy input and how entropy will bleed it away however slowly. Wealthy nerds do not just appear and create in a vacuum. And no judgement on the idealized nerd being discussed. Could be a wealthy anyone! A poor nerd needs the same protection as well as the means to do all the basic human stuff needed to exist and practice nerdery. (I laughed at that being a defined word) In terms of being a nerd and creating ethereal value, it looks to me like assuming wealth just makes it considerably easier to ignore where this stuff meets up with reality, a lot like some free energy machine presentations end up compelling enough to sideline the initial energy input...
    - FredPret 4y ago
      Fair points all. I meant my comment mostly in terms of negotiation. Rich nerds don't pop into existence out of a vacuum, but now that we exist, we can move to the country that suits each of us best and do the same work with roughly similar incomes. Yes, we still need the common infrastructure, but for the most part, I need a fast internet connection and a lack of bullets coming my way. This drastically reduces the hold any one country has over me, which is what allowed me to wave goodbye to my country of birth and move to a country where I like the tax/spend pattern more (Canada). Theoretically, one could site all earning, investing, and banking in some tax haven and just use a credit card to transact. We'll still need countries, but they will be more like regular infrastructure providers (civilization as a service?).
      - ddingus 4y ago
        "for the most part" Let's talk about farmers and fields for a moment: Early on in human history, the first farmers began their work with fertile ground. Mistakes were made, understanding gained, improvements were also made. And this is just humans being humans. Over time, it was observed the earth can become parched when farmed too many times without putting some of the yields back into the soil. There are no free lunches. Every so often, it is necessary to invest in the earth so that it remains fertile and yields bountiful. Farmers, having once learned this, continued to do it, and everyone is living in relative harmony. Along comes big Ag. Good yields are not good enough. They want the maximum, and they ignore history and proceed to max the ground out, and of course it becomes parched. Rather than invest in the maintenance of fertile ground, which requires some crops be grown to be turned back into earth, they treat the ground chemically and continue. And now there is a top soil problem where there was once fertile ground. And so they basically mooch top soil from somewhere else, and on it goes. Turns out those high yields are quite expensive for everyone else! Now, let's look at what you say you need: For example, what gives that fast Internet connection value? A wealthy society in which to derive that income! This is fertile ground. See where I am going with this? What happens when that wealthy society is not maintained? In other words, what happens when the ground becomes parched? Bullets, among many other things like it being harder to get that income due to lower demand as greater numbers of people struggle due to growing economic problems and those are generally due to labor not paying what it costs for people to actually exist and show up for work and perform that labor, and also generally due to debt accumulation in the form of "parched" societies in serious need of reinvestment. It's great to maximize it for you, thinking of only your considerations as if the rest of the world just comes gratis. It doesn't you know. Really, this is all no different from the farmer who does not see the need to reinvest in their ground. What they do is get all they can and when that ground becomes parched, they call it someone else's problem and move to new, fertile ground where they wash, rinse, repeat, until they have a lot of wealth accumulated and have left behind a lot of parched ground for others to restore to being fertile, and doing that isn't cheap!! That farmer could have invested in their ground, still could have accumulated considerable wealth, but would not be costing everyone around them very large sums of money while doing it. Nobody exists in a vacuum. Everything costs something. And if you are not paying it, someone else is forced to, and or where it's not paid, other costs and risks, such as bullets, tend to follow soon after. That's it. Ideally some food for thought regarding "needs" being far greater than the idealized picture you put here.
enasterosophes 4y ago
We did move beyond it, and what we got for it was covert operations infiltrating social media to influence national elections, along with various large organizations suffering ransomware and other hacking over the last few years. Even if you could go back to the wild west days of the 90s, most people these days would just complain about how people could go ahead and say whatever they wanted without being cancelled. We started with the dream you're referring to, and it couldn't stand up to the crappiness of reality.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
bitwize 4y ago
Yeah, we said that in the 90s too, that was the thesis of high-minded bullshit from the era like the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace". Look where it got us. There is no sphere that is outside the government's control. None. Create one, and the government will come round to enforce its will on it.
pessimizer 4y ago
Copyrights, patents, censorship and other kinds of monopolies on information are to human civilization as plaques are to an Alzheimer's-afflicted brain.
- yardstick 4y ago
  Copyrights and patents are quite different to censorship. Copyrights and parents provide assurances that spending large sums of money (millions/billions) to create new technology won’t be in vain. There are issues with both (too long copyright, patent trolls, obvious patents) but they are better than not having any protections. Why would anyone make a movie or game if it’s going to be almost exclusively pirated? Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc? Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Good will only goes so far. You’d only do it if the budget (risk) was peanuts, and unfortunately innovation needs money. People need a roof over their head and food on the table. Which would leave only rich governments with the means to fund such advancements, and their ideology often won’t be aligned to such endeavours.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    > they are better than not having any protections. People keep saying that, but no one comes up with any data to back up the assertion. > Why would anyone make a movie or game if it’s going to be almost exclusively pirated? Because they like it? See: 0AD, Nexuiz, Battle of Wesnoth. > Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc? I read someone posing this question and proposing the answer that yes, patrons are going to crowdfund what they want to see. > Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Good will only goes so far. Wait a minute: > they weren’t going to get paid for their research. Lack of protection is not connected to lack of remuneration. US government spends millions/billions to get data from the outer space, despite that data not being protected. > innovation needs money Makes me wonder how the innovation of money came about before there was money to spur innovation.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Reality is going to rudely awaken you in the not so distant future if that’s the way you think the tide is turning.
gjvnq 4y ago
For this to happen, we would need all the world to have compatible laws. Doing that without eroding national sovereignty is essentially impossible. We would need something like the European Union for all of humanity. And even the somewhat limited powers delegated to the EU were enough to cause serious backslash as we have seen during Brexit.

enasterosophes 4y ago

While it's disappointing, it's not exactly a surprise. Doctorow's been talking about "the war on general computation" for years. For about the same length of time, I've been saying that governments would eventually seek a monopoly over computation in the same way as they currently hold a monopoly over violence: it doesn't disappear or become physically impossible, but it requires registration, licensing and reporting, along with suitable punishments to deter those who would seek to usurp the monopoly.

Proven 4y ago
Yes, except that Doctorow has been promoting "the war on general computation" for years. Who's waging that war if not the State? Who has been calling for ever more regulation and (therefore) Big Government if not Doctorow? One has to be a fool to think that giving more power to the government will result in more freedom.
potamic 4y ago
When I learn about revolutions played out across the world, the recurring outcome seems to be measures to ensure citizens are not denied the means to usurp authority. Great men of the past seem to have concluded that the fundamental problem in any society is that power corrupts and the solution to a sane society is to provide citizens the means to put power in check. Just as freedom of speech, right to assemble or right to bear arms gives people the means to challenge authority, computation will be tomorrow's weapon of choice. More and more societal functions will rely on computation and those who have the means to compute will hold power. Data regulations might have good intentions, but it's a road to hell that will eventually deny citizens the right to "compute" and keep the balance of power titled.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

As a privacy geek… good.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
As a fellow privacy geek, I'd rather the laws applied universally rather than be split at the borders. Alas, it's the lesser evil.
- orwin 4y ago
  The industry had a chance to self regulate. Multiple chances even. It just doesn't work.
  - bzzzt 4y ago
    Not a CEO in the world will exit a profitable legal business and not get fired. Besides, the US also had multiple opportunities to fix their spying laws to give EU countries assurance their citizens data would be protected but actively chooses not to.
jokoon 4y ago
Yes, that's a bit what GDPR is about, so that's a good thing.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
if you think this has anything to do with privacy, I've got another bridge to sell you

timenova 4y ago

I have a genuine question about this. How are we supposed to isolate user data stored in, say Postgres, by region, and still do multi-region replication, and restoring correctly? And how is the application supposed to find which region a user's record is stored? For example, if the user's data is only supposed to be kept in the EU, and if the user tries to login connected to a US node, should the app forward the request to the EU node (and how would it know?), which then accesses the EU database? If all nodes are connected to all regional databases, does it even make a difference? Basically, I am very confused about regional separation of data while still running a single application.

jbigelow76 4y ago
I have a genuine question about this. How are we supposed to isolate user data stored in, say Postgres, by region, and still do multi-region replication, and restoring correctly? And how is the application supposed to find which region a user's record is stored? What part of your question is the concern of a bureaucrat? We can drop a couple 9s of uptime in the name of local data primacy right? (I specifically didn't say "data privacy") :)
- timenova 4y ago
  I believe it'll lead to much higher costs, CO2 emissions, and other issues, simply because this architecture will require more message passing, wasted bandwidth, will be less reliable, and have higher operational complexity. I get that those in decision-making power aren't usually technologically adept at figuring out solutions for these issues, but they should invest in solutions first.
  - wmf 4y ago
    I would predict that data localization leads to data traveling shorter distances because most people access their local region rather than everything going to us-east-1.
lstamour 4y ago
In a very small number of cases, regional storage of data becomes regional restrictions. You see that already in how it's unlikely you will be able to access your consumer account from both Russia and the US at the same time unless you have a travel history to one or both countries. Similarly, an app storing data for EU citizens might indeed say, no, we can't share this data outside the EU, we're not allowed. How it figures out if you're outside a region is, of course, problematic. But that's rare. Generally the data lives on a regional server and gets accessed by a CDN in a region near where the data will be delivered. If you're allowed to sign in from that region, then you're likely authorizing transfer of data (for the duration of that session) to that same region. As for multi-region replication, it's often the case there are multiple regions in the same country - for example, us-east-1 and us-central-1. No jurisdictional problems to host the data in two regions in the same country, after all. As to how you look up what region the user's data is stored in, well, you can keep a list of users and regions. Worst case, force the user to remember their region, and use separate copies of the website (and DNS) to pick a region to sign in on. For example, the same app/website, but at different country domains.

kkfx 4y ago

A different point-of-view: on one side people and so some institutions who happen starting doing a very little part of their job start to wonder how "safe" is living on someone else computer-systems and want something "more local" under their control. On the other some wannabe dictatorships start to think that covering their back parts from others propaganda can be good for them. That's NOT at all the end of borderless data, it's just the beginning of the end of GAFAM dominion since most States in the world and few Citizens start to want their own systems under their own control. Witch is actually mostly VERY good, the not good part is censorship but the west world authorities can only remain silent since their own censorship on their own people from Assange to present censorship and mud machines of "third parties" subjects they dislike (no matter the reasons), the missed part is popular reaction that so far AFAIK is hyper low. My fellow HNers if we want, for good reasons, a homeserver with our data instead of someone else services that can be banned, changes overnight in unpleasant manner, ... why someone else should want differently? Does this means the end of borderless internet? IMVHO DEFINITIVELY NOT it means just the end of some hyper giant players witch can be observed elsewhere like the end of mega-ships, mega-planes, mega-projects etc or just the passage from mainframes to clusters. The negative part is that we still not get much freedom simply because ways to control us are so many that even dropping smartphones and IT giants accounts to the bin (witch means GAFAM in the west, Yandex in Russia, Tancent in China etc) does not change anything since now digital controls is done by private parties (the aforementioned giants) under States laws like digital payment push, social scoring etc witch is the actual real dangerous and disastrous thing. For that the real missed point is: people need a basic IT culture to understand because now IT is a basic component of our society and to be Citizens we need to know a bit our society OR we can only be subjects/parasites. Only with such basic culture people in sufficient mass would push against certain dangerous aspects ON TIME.

coldtea 4y ago

Thank god

eqvinox 4y ago

This article is conflating pushes to control and censor data with pushes to provide privacy rights. Those are very different things that just happen, because they are enacted along nation boundaries, to both create these borders. Providing privacy rights is very much not a "nation accelerating efforts to control data", and shame on the NYT for muddling this.

Dracophoenix 4y ago
If a government can create privacy directives (which is not the same as a privacy right; rights cannot be legislated), they can legislate prior restraint at a level way worse than the DMCA.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  “rights cannot be legislated” How so?
  - leveraction 4y ago
    The basic idea is that rights are given by God, as opposed to privileges granted by the legislator. A legislator may grant or revoke privileges at any time. A legislator may not lawfully take away a right which it did not grant in the first place. At least that is the theory. In real life, the water gets pretty muddy. This is a very US perspective of course.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      The can't be created, but legislation can certainly protect rights.
      - User23 4y ago
        Privileges and immunities are the analog to rights that legislation can create.
    - 4y ago

jum1p 4y ago

"While the United States supports a free, unregulated approach that lets data zip between democratic nations unhindered, [...]" I think it's no secret that nations with the most market power were always for "free trade" and calling it so.

Jommi 4y ago

What if we put data servers in space?

hiccuphippo 4y ago
I remember gossip of The Pirate Bay people wanting to buy an unused offshore oil rig to obtain sovereignty. But the problem was, they needed to pay an ISP from some nearby country to get Internet access, making the project moot.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/Z2aVm https://archive.ph/Z2aVm http://web.archive.org/web/20220525122909/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/data-privacy-laws.html http://web.archive.org/web/20220525122909/https://www.nytime...

bhewes 4y ago

How I read this is now you need to put data servers in each country and follow the local rules related to data control. Says nothing about the insights you pull from the data. And the internet was built to withstand a nuclear war not some kind of utopia borderless data access.

ne0flex 4y ago

Recently, I've received an email from Google saying that my account was going to be switched over from Canada to US. I created my account in Canada and moved to the US 7 years ago. Google determined that since I mainly access my account from the US now that the "ownership" of my account should be transferred to Google US from Google Canada.

betwixthewires 4y ago

No it isn't. The era of borderless data for normal people who don't have time to learn new things is ending. Those of us that aren't interested in Facebook and twitter and wechat and whatever else are going to keep on trucking along with this "universal information availability" thing. We have Tor, VPNs, open source communication protocols, encryption, distributed and decentralized networks, free publishing and more.

rglullis 4y ago

Startup idea: mini-datacenters that can be installed in someone's basement or apartment building. Residents can run SOLID pods on these computers. Instead of user data going to the cloud, the cloud providers run their workloads directly on the user pods.

wmf 4y ago
Just use a regular data center.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Maybe I was too subtle. Let me fix it. As an user, do I really care whether my data is in the US, Germany or New Zealand, if all of Big Tech can exploit anyway? The only way for privacy is to have systems that never collect the data in the first place. A lot of the applications that we use today do not need to take your data to offer you functionality, but they could simply push their code to a computing environment controlled by the user, and run from there.
anthropodie 4y ago
Nope. No cloud providers. My data, my network, my choice how it becomes available to me when I'm away from my home. I don't want cloud in between.

bethecloud 4y ago

Decentralized cloud storage will keep data borderless