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- Hacker News
- Does it matter much? From one side, you are still in the 14 eyes countries (in fact, I would trust a Chinese server if i am living in the west and vice versa), on another side, emails as a protocol was never meant to be secure or private, so deal with it as that, if you are after private or secure communication, choose a protocol that provides that, adding more stuff to emails will only complicate it further plus giving false sense of privacy/security, gpg will leak meta data, receiver email server/client might expose you too, among many gaps, so just avoid it. Still, make sure your email spf dkim dmarc etc are set properly and carry on.by tamimio
- Seeing a lot of detail in the comments about the CLOUD act which applies as they(fastmail) themselves have an equivalent that was signed between USgov and Australia.
The more concerning issue as far as Australian based tech is The Assistance and Access Act 2018 which
"...permits government enforcement agencies to force businesses to hand over user info and data even though it’s protected by cryptography.
If firms don’t have the power to intercept encrypted data for authorities, they will be forced to create tools to allow law enforcement or government to have access to their users’ data."
As far as i know this has not been challenged or walked back and with the rise of ChatControl like laws doesnt seem it will.
by rzerowan - I call this "sovereignty washing": American companies pretending they can magically free themselves from the U.S. CLOUD Act by setting up a paper European presence.
Anyone who falls for this is a fool wanting to be fooled.
by hn_submit - Nice, as a European customer, I appreciate this.
Side note, I moved to Fastmail a couple years ago, and so far I’ve been very happy with it! The Gmail migrator works great, too.
by cube2222 - Or you can just use any of the actual European companies (I’m using Tuta).by tumdum_
- Posted on the previous submission for this: it’s a good start, but from the article:
If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
by robin_reala - EU folks, note the warnings threaded throughout this post: this is not currently any sort of panacea against US or AU data hosting risks, but it will make your data noticeably closer to home. Fastmail (Australia) merged with Pobox (Philadelphia) resulting in a complex tri-national law/risk surface when the EU is involved, so go in eyes wide open having read this in full. That everyone will overinterpret “EU data region” to mean “for privacy” here until reading the article is completely understandable; I empathize, having done the same.by altairprime
- EU data regions are a reflexive action by companies that try to hold on to their EU customers (and more and more are leaving, surprisingly the larger ones seem to be leading here). Realize that as long as you are still hosted on US owned infrastructure or that if there are US (or: five-eyes) owned companies anywhere in the stack your data can still be forcibly pulled and often without you being aware that this happened. There are only very few such stacks that are 100% owned by EU entities.by jacquesm