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Comment by weland | Hacker News Reader

> Yeah good luck setting up a startup now. If other countries follow Russia's suit, we'll soon end up having to somehow determine where a user is from (what if they're roaming, etc.?) so we can shard the datastore across multiple geographic locations.

Or just host everything in Europe.

Or lobby Congress to stop shitting all over privacy so that the US can be considered a safe harbour again.

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Hosting in Europe wouldn't fix the issue that Russian law wants to have Russian persons' info stored in Russia. It could very easily end up with several countries requiring this, and needing to store data differently depending on user's selected country.

And think about it: is there a really huge increase to privacy? What exact attack scenarios does this defeat, and how likely are such scenarios compared to run-of-the-mill privacy breaches (lax security)?

It's obviously about regulatory requirements rather than a random hacker. If I host my data in the US, then I am subject to the whims of the US government, and as such they have jurisdiction over European data (which of course, is not protected in any way in the US, even by the meagre data protection laws that the US affords its own citizens).

The problem is there are some judges in the US who disagree. So ultimately it might not even matter where your data is stored:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/29/us-court-m...

> And think about it: is there a really huge increase to privacy? What exact attack scenarios does this defeat, and how likely are such scenarios compared to run-of-the-mill privacy breaches (lax security)?

Those are two entirely different scenarios. There's no reason both couldn't (and shouldn't) be handled in parallel. For example starting next year companies within the EU are held liable for data loss, with up to IIRC 3% of their global revenue. That policy handles the lax security concerns; no reason to not tackle other problems, like the one described on this thread.

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