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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure why this was downvoted so heavily, because it has a point. The US is obviously not a trustworthy partner, but neither is China.

At least American companies still reside in a somewhat democracy where they’ll actually protect our rights, even if we’re European. Sure it’s not for noble goals, they want to make money, and they won’t if they don’t care for data security.

Google cloud is the prime example of this. The European public sector is spending billions on Clouds these years, and none of that is going to Google, because Google doesn’t protect your data the same way Microsoft does.

I can physically visit the Azure instances that house our data, and nothing but our data, and it never leaves the union.

Maybe the NSA still listens in, maybe China does too, but it’s not legal for them to do so the way it would be in the Alibaba or google clouds.

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What does Microsoft do that other cloud providers like Google do not do? If I store my data in GCP region europe-west3 (Frankfurt) are you saying that Google will leak that data to some third party or send it out of that region?

Maybe the NSA still listens in, maybe China does too, but it’s not legal for them to do so the way it would be in the Alibaba or google clouds.

What is the legal difference between the NSA intercepting European GCP traffic and European Azure traffic?

Google wouldn’t guarantee data wouldn’t leave EU for the longest time, and still don’t on some services.

They were also extremely slow to adopt EU legislation required, and still haven’t for all services.

Microsoft by contrast did so immediately, with Amazon doing so as well shortly after.

Still, when I ask our DPO which cloud is better, he’ll point to Azure, then AWS and directly advice against using Google.

Which is a shame, because I’d actually like to use firebase and flutter to up our production effectiveness on mobile. As one example.

It’s also why we solely rely on OpenStreetMap instead of using google maps, even though supporting OSM with server infrastructure to do so is more expensive. At least these days, OSM is a great map service, but we also used it when it wasn’t.

Hi there! Thanks for the info. I'd like to use Google Cloud in the EU - do you have a recent reference for this? I googled but could only find more generic info about GDPR compliance etc.

"Google will leak that data to some third party or send it out of that region?"

Yes. Every municipality around here goes with Microsoft or their own on premises installations for this very reason.

Strange schizophrenia from Microsoft - having actually presumably secure cloud instances on site, and actively making their other products less secure by monitoring users of their core OS and Office suites even if users specifically want to prevent that, even the top enterprise editions. I understand those are different parts of the company managed by different persons, but at the end, top of the pyramid is the same.

Corporations are like people - they don't change. You can put on different mask every day, but underneath its the same flesh and bones (or decision makers in this case). I would be wary of the notion that Microsoft is somehow a good moral company in one specific area, when it is amoral in others.

I agree. However, I don't think you should first at how moral or amoral they seem, but rather try to evaluate how credible their offer is. If their secure products make money, hopefully this kind of product offer will prevail, or at least survive within the beast.

Though, morality is part of corporate culture, and I think different cultures can have different levels of toxicity. Cough Oracle cough. If the corporation is too affected, it may be foolish to even waste time evaluating their, on paper, decent and secure offer. If you have reason to believe they will find a way to throw you under the bus anyway later on.

> Corporations are like people - they don't change. You can put on different mask every day, but underneath its the same flesh and bones (or decision makers in this case).

Yes, Satya Nadella is the CEO of the company, but Azure and Windows are in completely separate organizations, with completely separate senior leadership. The goals of the two organizations are also vastly different, with one is focused on consumer products (Windows) while the other is focused on developer and enterpirse services (Azure). Because of this, the decisions made by one SLT is not at all indicative of another SLT's decisions.

Disclaimer: MSFT Employee working in Azure.

well said

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