Facebook pressured Canada to ease up on data rules, U.K. reports say | Hacker News Reader

Facebook pressured Canada to ease up on data rules, U.K. reports say

cbc.ca

100 pointsstygiansonic23 comments

Original story discussed two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289381

Just for a little context, I think it's worth mentioning that this news comes to light when Canadians are thinking quite a bit about companies lobbying the gov't, as a bit of a scandal is brewing with the current liberal gov't[0].

This news implicates the former conservative gov't, and might quickly become a talking point for the current liberal gov't.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-scheer-call...

Man... as someone living south of you guys where there are 10 worse scandals generated per day (a scandal DDoS ?)... I’m envious of the one (1) scandal. Seems quaint. :)

I think it is your perception that there are less scandals.

From the article:

> Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs, in exchange for the federal government offering assurances that it would not impose its jurisdiction over the company's non-Canadian data.

The Canadians agreed to not regulate other countries data. This seems pretty reasonable. Why should the Canadian government regulate how an American tech company handles German data? It makes a lot more sense for each country to have jurisdiction over data from (1) its own citizens, (2) residents on its soil or (3) data physically stored on its soil.

That this was a result of "lobbying" or "pressure" is supposed to rile us up, but this type of thing could not be more common in the political world. FB, one of the 10 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, would be stupid not to engage in global lobbying.

It reads to me like 3 would apply here - they don't have jurisdiction over unrelated data stored elsewhere (else data-havens would not be a thing) by a company headquartered outside their country (AFAIK - IANAL). I read it as: FB wanted to store [whatever data they wanted] in Canada, and didn't want Canada to impose any rules on [outside-Canada data].

Basically they wanted a data-haven. Not all that surprising of an ask, but I don't think Canada does that in general.

What do you think the phrase "non-Canadian data" means? From what you write, you appear to presume that "non-Canadian data" means data that is not about Canadian citizens anywhere in the world, not about businesses or individuals on Canadian soil, and not physically stored in Canada.

I don't see anything in the article clarifying that. You may be right, but then again the discussion could have been about data that is physically stored in the data centre but is not about Canadian citizens or resident entities.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that what was being discussed was data stored in the data centre on Canadian soil, given the clue that what they wanted was the data-centre exempt from jurisdiction.

If Canada was asserting jurisdiction over data not in the data centre, I would have expected the terms to be worded around seeking worldwide exemption from jurisdiction.

JM2C.

> > Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs

The idea that a datacenter creates a lot of good paying jobs is almost 90% bullshit. There is a brief burst of construction and trades related jobs when it's being built. But after that, all of the software engineering and systems engineering is going on elsewhere. Companies have no need to pay their high six figure salary staff to relocate to Quincy, WA.

The number of people you need to do maintenance activities like rack and unrack equipment, swap hard drives, swap fans and power supplies is really minimal. Like, a rotating shift of six people for a huge facility. And those persons don't need to be very expensive salary wise. I've seen persons who were previously $16/hour Comcast TV installers successfully recruited into entry level datacenter technician jobs.

All that, and plenty of places in Canada have cheap power and cooler climates.

There’s no need to offer incentives for data centres, they’ll get built in Canada anyway.

not that many places have a combination of really good fiber infrastructure/IX points and cheap power. The big OVH datacenter in Quebec in the former aluminum smelter is a notable exception. Other than Hydro Quebec, the $/kWh rate in a lot of Canada is not attractive.

Maybe you can get a good $/kWh rate in parts of Manitoba but the fiber connectivity options to get to major IX points (Seattle, Chicago, Kansas City, etc) are very poor.

And in those places where it is moderately attractive, with USD to CAD exchange rate (BCHydro territory), the fiber connectivity options are limited compared to sites that are slightly south, fed from the American BPA hydroelectric dams on the Columbia river (Quincy, East Wenatchee, The Dalles, and Hillsboro). Those places happen to have both cheap long term power contracts and great fiber connectivity by comparison.

Depends on how much redundancy and low-latency you need.

If cheap processing power is mainly what you’re after, Quebec still seems like the way to go.

Cheap electricity without being on a fault line is somewhat unique (admittedly less of an issue the more inland in WA).

> Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs, in exchange for the federal government offering assurances that it would not impose its jurisdiction over the company's non-Canadian data.

This should not be legal in the first place.

which part?

>Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs, in exchange for the federal government offering assurances

>impose its jurisdiction over the company's non-Canadian data

The latter part is italicized in the GP.

I don't really understand the legality argument though. Canada is a sovereign nation.

Canadian here. I could maybe (by which I mean probably not because of edge cases but the concept basically makes sense) get behind making it illegal under under Canadian Law to say "we'll do X if you promise not to pass laws about Y". That sounds a lot like bribery to me.

Note that "assurances" is italicized in OP - the former sentence better captures the meaning of the italicized area despite only containing one word of it.

That is exactly what I meant, sorry if I was unclear.

Its embarrassing to have your sovereign government changing its policy for a social media company's data center.

We need to create our own jobs, give smart people a good reason to stop moving to the states.

What exactly is Canadian data? Is it data generated by Canadian citizens? What if people change citizenships? Is it data generated by all people on Canadian soil? What if you post something while transiting the Arctic Circle in an airplane? How does it include relationships between Canadians and non-Canadians? 90% of Canadians live along the U.S.-Canada border. Does data partially derived from Canadians count (e.g. ML models)? I read the article and it was not clear how the lines were drawn and how they will evolve with time.

Pretty sure this messiness is both why Facebook does not want the government to be enforcing privacy rules, and why the government wishes to do so in the first place.

All laws are messy, but what is even messier are the consequences of laissez-faire capitalism.

One minute you're saying that the government has no business in the private communications of its citizens, the next minute somebody's operating a child pornography ring on the internet.

In part, data in each country generally falls under data residency laws - what is stored on servers in that country.

The Canadian government better stay off greasing these tech companies or it would lose in the upcoming elections.

Canada likes tech, but it also values privacy.

normally these big tech companies have something mildly redeeming about them. google has a huge presence in oss, apple cares about privacy, etc. but it seems facebook has nothing. even their outreach into third world countries was a thinly veiled attempt to lock more users into their platform.

Not a fan of facebook, as a consumer app. But what you're saying just isn't true. This list is crazy impressive https://opensource.facebook.com/

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