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Hear me now, believe me later: If you keep your customer data on your servers, it behooves you to host your servers outside the USA. If you do this now, while
by nirvana 14y ago
Hear me now, believe me later: If you keep your customer data on your servers, it behooves you to host your servers outside the USA.
If you do this now, while you're a startup, you'll have a lot less hassle in the future when you're losing customers because of jurisdictional problems.
Right now, people are only barely aware of the growing surveillance state in the USA. They're all aware of it, of course, but they think that only terrorists have to worry. In the last couple years, increasingly the government has gone after regular people, like hip hop blog authors, and people using megaupload to avoid emails file size limits.
I'm sure for many of you, you don't care cause you're hosting cat pictures or whatnot. But if you've got customer confidential data, especially financial data, it would be a good idea to find a jurisdiction that still respects privacy.
I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but my casual explorations indicate that Iceland might be a good jurisdiction.
- greenyoda 14y agoWeren't Megaupload's servers outside the USA? Edit: Many of their servers were located in the US.
- bybjorn 14y agoHosted in the US, according to this www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/legal-and-management/megaupload-s-pirated-content-hosted-on-u-1005937752.story
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- stfu 14y agoDotcom is actually working hard to keep the servers for the Mega project in NZ. Apparently even working on a new sea cable to the US.
- GauntletWizard 14y agoCorrection: Host your users data outside of the country they reside in. The EU is just as bad about this as the US is - An unnamed EU nation ruled that all user data stored on servers in their jurisdiction and pertaining to users in their jurisdiction was subject to police investigation without warrant, subpoena, or the hosting provider to inform the users that their data had, or could be, accessed in this way. My company still runs a datacenter within that country - but we assure that no users that reside there also have their data stored there. Making it cross-jurisdictional, even a little bit - the user data is still in the EU - does wonders for privacy. I wish that the courts would rule cell phones and hosted services an extension of the human mind (and thus protected under the fifth), but I doubt I will ever see this. Too many people fail to see how vulnerable they are.
- bbotond 14y agoCould you please tell us which EU country is that? Or at least tell me if it is the UK or the Netherlands? We have some servers in those countries and the last thing we want is them to be searched (they store extremely personal information about our users).
- switch007 14y agoI don't think it's the UK; they wouldn't be that open it. Minor details of random government bodies (or police departments) people able to demand data from ISPs without a court order are usually hidden away in some "think about the children" act. There are various bodies (perhaps fewer now than maybe 5 years ago, though) that have the power just to demand data from an ISP without a court order.