> but there just isn't a viable alternative.
Why can't the state build a data center and host some Matrix, Nextcloud and Moodle instances? To me that would seem like tax money being used as intended by the taxpayer.
Why can't the state build a data center and host some Matrix, Nextcloud and Moodle instances? To me that would seem like tax money being used as intended by the taxpayer.
Switching from a cloud run by professionals to a self-hosted Nextcloud would be a massive downgrade in information privacy.
We already know google, microsoft and apple have unfettered access to your data too. With self hosting, at least I have a chance of knowing when my data's being monitored & I can choose increasingly severe security around that system. The big players can only offer promises with little to no way for us to verify the truth of any one of their statements.
So, unless the big players offer e2ee as a default, it's best to assume the worst from them. With nextcloud it's far less necessary if you're rolling your own (but it supports a form of encryption anyhow)
C'mon really. The whole central point of this euro scaremongering is that Google will turn over your data to intelligence agencies when U.S. court orders it to do so. Now imagine that for whatever fanciful and obviously highly unlikely reason the C.I.A. wants your PDFs. You are claiming this will be visible to you, that you will be able to defend yourself against hardware supply chain attacks, attacks on the media you downloaded to install CrapNux on your servers, attacks against your NextCloud auto-updates, attacks against the whole rest of your software supply chain, social engineering attacks against your sysadmins, attacks against your hard disk drive waste stream, and all the rest of it? And you will be able to achieve this on the budget on a Dutch primary school?
Look, I think it would be cool if nation-sized bureaucracies had the doctrines and practices that allowed them to be actually safer than the cloud, but as it stands they do not.
Euro scaremongering? [0] [1]
Particularly that court mention is weird, considering how the FISA court is very much just a rubberstamp formality.
> Now imagine that for whatever fanciful and obviously highly unlikely reason the C.I.A. wants your PDFs.
That "fanciful reason" could be that my company developed a breakthrough technology/medication/chemical.
Which is exactly the kind of stuff the NSA is very interested in, so it can "patent subsidize" US industries with them [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
[1] https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
I am sure, Google has ways to abuse data that do not include any courts.
> U.S. court order
If only it worked like that.
IMHO Europe should just do something like create an https://www.inria.fr/en for writing sane software that acknowledges and handles the complexities of governance. Can't image that paying tons of grad students good money to design and hack something in Ocaml/Haskell that actually works is more expensive than the status quo.
They can afford professionals.
That all seems solveable to me with enough money and time. What if a billion Euro gets invested into infrastructure and hardening of these tools? I think everything that you describe is a result of underinvestment. Extorting our kids data to Google cannot be better.
We aren't also outsourcing the military to Blackwater and the secret service to Facebook, just because they can run it more efficiently.
https://www.dataport.de/pressemitteilung/dataport-stellt-ope...