Fastmail offers EU data region
fastmail.com
fastmail.com
> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Even the entire EU is in the process of negotiating the same agreement.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/united-states-and-ca...
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...
Things have changed. With Chinese law in regards to data within Chinese jurisdiction a long-standing thing and an unfriendly American government potentially in power for an extended period, other countries are realizing the importance of data sovereignty.
> The latter states that negotiation with the EU on this topic was suspended in 2019.
Dated 2023:
> Justice Department and European Commission Announces Resumption of U.S. and EU Negotiations on Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations
The negotiations are still ongoing. Canada is further along than the EU.
You can read the text right here:
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...
The same agreement is in place with the UK. Canada and EU are currently in the process of negotiating it.
The Five Eyes is an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are party to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
Does fastmail have a US presence? If no - then they're not bound at all by US jurisdiction.
See: https://roncobb.net/img/cartoons/aus/k5092-on-Tucker_Box-cuu...
The question is: do they office services to residents of said country / state.
If so they may well be subject to certain laws that, if broken, could result in penalties up to an including extradition of the responsible officers.
This hasn't been true for several years. All Australian companies (and UK companies) are under jurisdiction of the US Cloud Act. Just the same as American companies are.
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...
They didn't even manage to extradite Kim Dotcom for years.
It's unfortunate for us, but we very rarely isolate individual government systems for other nations.
It was the MLAT thing that the various civil liberties groups object to (I'll cover the problems with those down below). There was very little objection to the first part.
The first part was not controversial because pretty much every country has something equivalent (for reasons I'll cover below), as did the US except specifically in the case of data covered by the SCA due to poor drafting.
One of the big reasons for the SCA was created was the emerging "third party doctrine" meant that instead of having to get a warrant or subpoena against you to get your data they could simply subpoena it from any of your service providers that had it. The SCA made it so the third party doctrine subpoenas would not apply to stored communications.
There were still cases where the government would need to compel the service provider to turn over the data. They wanted something with the probable cause requirements of a warrant but the delivery method of a subpoena. (A subpoena asks someone who controls the data to turn a copy over. A warrant is for when the government wants to raid the data center and seize the data. Since that involves the government directly acting where the data is located it only applies to someplace where they have jurisdiction).
So they created a new thing, the SCA warrant. The called it a "warrant" because it had the probable cause requirements of a warrant, but neglected to add something saying that in other respects it functions like a subpoena. I'll call this a pseudo-warrant.
The SCA was not the first pseudo-warrant. That would be the warrants under the Wiretap Act of 1968. Territoriality questions did not arise under that because by its nature the data it sought copies of was always in the US.
With the SCA the data might not necessarily be in the US. Years later Microsoft argued that because it is a "warrant" it should have the territorial restrictions that normal warrants have. The CLOUD Act clarified that it was indeed supposed to be like a subpoena as far as territoriality goes.
There have been some more pseudo-warrants created since then, but their drafters learned from the SCA and made sure the original legislation was clear on just what they were.
The reason pretty much every country has something like that, going back well before online documents, is because not having such a thing leads to big problems. If anyone in the country could shield documents from subpoenas (or whatever the equivalent is called in that country) by merely storing them across a border every company with documents that it needs to keep but that might be incriminating later would get sent to a storage facility across a border as soon as they were no longer actively using them.
For example as soon as a car company in Detroit releases a new car all the documents where during development engineers brought up safety concerns which management decided to not address would be sent across the bridge to a storage facility in Canada.
With electronic documents it is even easier. You would not have to wait until you aren't actively using the documents to stick them outside the country. Just stick your file server across a border and make sure you only have copies in country when someone is actively reading or editing them.
And so pretty much everywhere subpoenas compel someone in the country who controls the documents to fetch them (or copies) and turn them over. The actual location of the documents is completely irrelevant.
The thing that was worrying about the CLOUD Act was the MLAT provisions. MLATs are treaties where the participating countries agree on law enforcement. They include things like sharing information and cooperating on investigations. Normally these are enacted just like any other treaty. The executive branch negotiates them and then the Senate votes on ratification.
The CLOUD Act adds an expedited process where the Attorney General and the Secretary of State can sign an MLAT. Congress is not involved. These agreements allow foreign law enforcement to make requests directly to US service providers instead of going through the diplomatic channels normal MLAT requests go through, and they allow them access to stored communications that the SCA would normally block.
There are some safeguards. The foreign government is not supposed to intentionally target US people who are in the US and are not not supposed to use the data they get to infringe freedom of expression. There's also a 180 day window before these executive MLATs take effect during which Congress can block them by passing a joint resolution to do so.
Civil rights groups and many others were not impressed with those safeguards.
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...
We’ve installed our own servers, co-located in a secure facility in Amsterdam, set up by our own engineers.
as a german i feel the urge to point out that this technically also applies to european companies... With more hurdles for the US, but still technically applicable
(At least that's what people keep telling me, im not a lawyer)
Which I may add: you could've easily found out yourself too if you looked up what I wrote.
The issue in America is the president has more power to act unilaterally (maybe to address his/her own interests, maybe not) than any European politician.
Are you sure about that? European legal theory for insider trading implicitly covers more cases than the US without needing to explicitly enumerate them as far as I understand (in a nutshell, trading on insider information is illegal regardless of the source or whether any fiduciary duty was breached), and I'd be surprised if this case were not covered.
The Trump regime a way more corrupt than anything currently seen in Europe.
He currently attempting to steal Greenland so he can strip it of mineral assets for fucks sack.
No politician in Europe is starting wars for personal gain.
Only Trump and Putin.
Isn't that that basically the history of Europe? A short French or German or English or Roman dude starting a war for personal gain?
Is that the standard we're holding Trump to though?
Do you really think it's OK for him to invade other countries for personal enrichment because historic tyrants also did the same?
I suggest you show up for next EU election if you don't like the option.
The next election is in 2029. I suggest you show up instead of spreading fabrications online.
That’s democracy in its purest form.
It is worth remembering at this point how von der Leyen first became Commission President. She was controversially nominated by the European Council - who are not directly elected representatives within the EU system - deviating from the spitzenkandidat convention in a way that surprised and angered many MEPs - who are. Her own national government (Germany) did not support her in the Council voting because one of the parties in the governing coalition opposed her. She was eventually confirmed by a narrow majority in a secret ballot of the European Parliament from which little can therefore be determined about who did or didn't vote for her except that quite a lot of MEPs who were expected to support her candidacy based on public statements did not in fact do so in the secret vote.
So she was essentially proposed by a group of people who aren't directly elected at EU level and in some cases aren't even directly elected by the nations they represent - in violation of the normal convention expected by the only people who are directly elected at EU level - and was then narrowly confirmed by that directly elected group only in a secret ballot from which the vote of each individual representative was not recorded and there is therefore no possibility for their own electorates to hold those representatives to account personally for how they voted. Given that we are talking about the most influential political post in the EU this is not exactly a powerful demonstration of democratic legitimacy and a clear popular mandate no matter how you look at it.
Everything else she does needs to be confirmed by representatives of your own member state.
Just like EVERY OTHER democracy.
Not really.
In most representative democracies it is the elected representatives who initiate new law. In the EU the elected MEPs have no power to do this and it is the role of the unelected Commission to start the process.
Meanwhile the Commission is also the "executive branch" of the EU. A great deal of what the commissioners do is not directly subject to approval by the European Parliament.
The Council is the one that generally consists of the leaders of each member state. It has important roles in the system including selecting candidates for key roles and as part of "trilogue" negotiations (which are themselves sometimes controversial for being secretive and unaccountable) but has little formal participation in the normal legislative process.
The Parliament is the one whose members are elected by the citizens of the EU. Its best known role is to debate and vote on new legislation.
The Commission holds much of the real power as it serves as both the leadership of the executive branch and the origin of new legislative proposals - and yet its members are chosen via much less transparent means and have little personal accountability to EU citizens.
Many EU commissioners have been politicians whose national political careers were struggling and - like appointment to the House of Lords here in the UK - they may have been put forward for the Commission by their national political leadership as a position of influence that required less confirmation than winning a popular vote. This is relevant here because von der Leyen herself is arguably in this category.
Still, calling the system undemocratic is a stretch since anyone who pays attention can see how EU policies have shifted after the far right increased the number of their seats in the previous election. Climate ambition has been dialed way down and immigration is being curtailed.
- Elections are so rare (every 5 years) and encompass so many huge life-altering choices (VDL being one of the criteria only) that it's not democratic. The Swiss vote every important law, like "Should we buy fighter jets".
- De facto, party health is part of democracy (look at the Rwanda: It is absolutely possible to have a genocide made by democracies, and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships) and network effects have made that European parties don't represent the people's will,
- Europe dispatches money to countries that need convincing, like Scottland, while wearing the mature members' citizen to the bone. We can't even have decent roads or internet here, while newcomers are super-happy to join ("I'm happy because Europe brought wealth and economic development!!!" - yeah look in 20 years). Money flushing around Europe trying to bribe citizens groups into staying, which makes opposition impossible. The EU is too chicken to let citizen vote every 20 years on whether we should stay in Europe, because then answer would be a big NO.
- The kill switch didn't even work, countries can't leave, or there is retaliation. Not only UK but France voted against the new treaties in 2005, the president still signed them.
The EU is the most lazy level of democracy. It's a knee-jerk reaction to say that VDL can be removed from office by the citizen.
Rwanda has never been a democracy. Habyarimana was "elected" with 99% of the votes ffs.
> and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships
It is trivially easy to verify that this is not true.
Rwanda came for help to France 2 years before, and France conditionned its financial help to a democratisation process.
- From here, about 150 parties got born.
- The previous dictatorship, even of the majority, was protecting the minority, because they knew the international consequence on countries who don't protect the minorities.
- Once a democracy, it was a leadership of the majority ethnicity (90% Hutu) so you bet they had no qualms about protecting the Tutsis. Tensions and invitation to violence soared immediately, but in a coveted speech.
- A plane containing half the government was bombed, the country woke up without clear leadership, elections didn't happen fast enough. Citizen acted with their own machetes.
Democracy means the majority owns the decisions. Doesn't mean they'll be good people.
Well us Brits tried that experiment and it isn't seen as a success.
What is not a success is:
- The EU taking retaliation against them,
- The EU parties overturning members of the Leave party into the Libdem, AFTER being elected (yes, it happened for 16 members, plus the ones who didn't officially switch but stalled the Leave party's proceedings),
- From the moment they clearly voted NO, it took 3 more votes until they could be allowed to leave. Basically, it was until it was clear the UK citizenry would be entirely blocking the democratic process until the EU-Leave decision was enacted. You can understand people's despair of democracy when a clear LEAVE vote isn't enacted, like in France 2005.
In the rest of the EU, they're too chicken to let us vote. But they will let us vote... one day... only in areas where they're guaranteed a large STAY result.
The EU is only letting us vote when the answer is Yes.
Taking several votes for such a big decision is good. It prevents impulsive hotheadedness from making a ruinous decision. The UK did vote to leave and then left.
And it ruined the UK. That's why other people are saying it was a bad idea. Not because they didn't vote, but because the thing they voted for ruined them.
Except the catchphrase of the day was "Brexit means Brexit", because no one bothered to define what we were voting for until we'll after the fact. There were plenty of options such as a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit. Even the hard Brexit kept us in some institutions so what we got was harder than the hardest Brexit discussed.
So in what way did we get what we voted for?
I live in the UK, on paper we have an absolutely terrible version of democracy. No constitution, and un elected head of state. Compared to pre pull out Afghanistan it sucks. And yet we are still here. Perfect on paper democracy isn't the be all and end all. It's about institutional culture. The EU has a much better democratic culture than the US does.
Just because you disagree with a law, that doesn't make it "corruption" - it does make you an authoritarian that attacks democracy as soon as other people don't vote like you want.
Please stop spreading fabrications - even when you dislike the result. That's fascist behaviour.
"Chat control 1" is the deliberately misleading name for "Facebook is not banned from using CSAM scanners on your DMs if it wants to" - I don't think it's worth voting someone out based on that. The one that bans encryption is called "chat control 2". I assume they've both got the same name as part of a deception tactic.
Again, vote out the ones that are in favor and replace them with ones that will vote against the proposal.
If the law is initiated by the parliament and not by some company through lobby. Lobby is corruption.
And as the Americans are choosing to interfere in European domestic politics and trample their own laws and constitution the more scrutiny their requests will get.
Not that I don’t trust the statement, I just would like to know more.
https://thenextweb.com/news/airbus-scaleway-aws-sovereign-cl...
And many others besides, pretty much every company I've looked at in the last year is either acutely aware of the problem or they are already executing on it. With Trump and his merry band of criminals repeatedly stating they're going to take Greenland by force you can't blame them either, that would effectively put the EU on a war footing with the United States (I still can't believe I'm writing this sort of thing and it is not entirely fiction), the end result of that would be that there would be an absolute run on EU hosted capacity. They're just trying to beat the rush and hope they'll never be proven to be right.
Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415217 - June 2026 (235 comments)
Netherlands reaches deal with European cloud company to decrease U.S. tech reliance - https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/24/netherlands-reaches-deal-europ... - April 24th, 2026
Wary of US Big Tech, the EU looks to build its “EuroStack” - https://sherwood.news/world/wary-of-us-big-tech-the-eu-looks... - March 18th, 2026
Why European Companies Are Leaving US Cloud Providers in 2026 — And Where They're Going - https://massivegrid.com/blog/european-companies-leaving-us-c... - March 12th, 2026
Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech - https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/12/22/europe-gets-... - December 22nd, 2025
Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack - https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/10/15/schleswig-ho... - October 15th, 2025
EU Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
EU-US Data Transfers: First Reaction on "Latombe" Case - https://noyb.eu/en/eu-us-data-transfers-first-reaction-latom... (2025-09)
EU-US Data Transfers: Time to prepare for more trouble to come - https://noyb.eu/en/eu-us-data-transfers-time-prepare-more-tr... (2025-12)
US Supreme Court just blew up EU-US Data Transfers - https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-tra... (2026-06)
I was up to date on noyb, but not aware that actually companies are moving at this speed and size.
Thanks all for some great resources
Fastmail used to be based in Melbourne only, but after the Pobox merger it ended up with an office in Philadelphia too. No idea how the balance of things is between the offices now.
Source: I founded FastMail.
- The US could request your data. You probably shouldn't use e-mail for anything sensitive anyway for many reasons. E-Mail was traditionally not encrypted and I think that many servers still allow plain-text communication. The protocols are old and there are all kinds of downgrade attacks. Aside from that, even if your service does not fall under the CLOUD Act, you are probably f*cked anyway, because most people you communicate with are using services that fall under the CLOUD Act.
- The US can force the provider to block your account. The workarounds are: regularly backup your e-mail (easy for services that offer IMAP) and, most importantly, use a domain with an extension that is not under the control of a US (or probably five eyes) registrar.
Use an E2E-encrypted messenger with perfect forward secrecy, etc. for most personal communication.
However, most people these days are using webmail from the big-tech companies which makes it relatively easy for LEA and intelligence agencies to read your email.
What can you do about it? FDE? Can you keep the keys away from Hetzner? How much hacking would they need to do to get them? Can US government break SecureBoot?
Im just happy my business is not important enough
The only way to spin this as hetzner is to go public with this and make it a political point for geopolitics between the EU and the US, and take the loss /call the bluff on the US threat.
I don't think any of us have the total picture, but the bits that I do have are sufficient to worry me about the degree to which I am automatically breaking the NDAs I sign by using a computer, email, online data rooms and so on.
Similar happened already with OVH Canada vs France.
> In an affidavit, Xavier Barriere, corporate counsel at OVH in Paris, describes the dramatic situation: If the important proponent of European data sovereignty were to comply with the Canadian order, those responsible in France would be committing a criminal offense. They face up to six months in prison and fines of up to 90,000 euros per violation. However, if OVH ignores the Canadian court, it faces contempt of court proceedings in Ontario, which can also lead to severe sanctions.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Canadian-Court-OVHcloud-from-Fr...
And one comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060903
A difference could be that Germany might not have such blocking law as France. At least I have never heard of it.
If it had been the European one that was the subsidiary, then Canada could order the OVH parent company to order the subsidiary to do things.
AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, Schwarz Digits, SAP
Like, the critical problem with the AWS sovereign pitch is that you must believe that they won’t give the keys to the US, and they also won’t give the source code that’s hosted in the US to the government either for them to find vulnerabilities in. I don’t know if that’s good enough unless you just need the data to stay in the EU and you don’t care if another country sees it.
I know they probably did some work on it (what if primary AWS goes rogue and the EU entity must work without it) but I don’t know if they explained how they’re safe to the public.
I am assuming the reason companies switch to them is not price or tech. US cloud providers have the advantage on both.
Selling EU companies data would mean destroying trust over their main selling point, not to mention incur on EU wrath.
Feels like living one whistleblower away from doom.
I refer to fully EU clouds, parent list includes US clouds that do not need bags of money, Clouds Act in enough.
What? Those are US companies, they will have to give out your data under the Cloud Act. Only Schwarz and SAP are free from that by being German companies.
Not true. You also have to be sure that the company directors will never travel to the US even for a holiday or any third party country that would uphold an extradition request from the US.
It's just email. Nobody is going to jail to protect your email.
If you care that much run your own email server.
Just because they pretend to be European-based by setting up a European subsidiary with so-called firewalls means exactly...nothing.
Swiss corporation with data centers in Luxembourg.
It stops just short of saying that you must do thispreemptively, but is pretty clear that you must do it if they ask you to.
I admit it is a concern, as a Fastmail user, but this discussion only seems to happen on the Fastmail threads, yet no one bats an eye if one is suggested to open a gmail account like everybody else.
Not sure why you haven’t heard about it but US Cloud Act is a big reason for EU companies not trusting US companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
There is lot of hate toward Google (and other top US companies). Especially due to autobanning of accounts, 2FA etc. at the moment people have fastmail as their darling - because they are the underdog, no AI forcing in products (at the moment) etc. It is like stripe from 5 years ago.
Most have given up in snooping. Or you need to go to proton mail but it has other issues. Every company is subject to some regulations.
at the end, if the receiver of email has to also keep it safe. Do they?
Also it got busted for funding some right wing movements.
Also it got busted for sharing data with governments leading to some activists getting arrested.
I can't relate, I hear people complaining about American spyware online all the time in tech circles like HN.
American products in particular are often mass consumer products that aren't particularly privacy focused. Everyone who cares about privacy already knows that Gmail isn't private - not only is it American, it's also owned by a domestic espionage conglomerate - but might be expecting Fastmail to be private, so that one is newsworthy.
Their homepage:
Free email isn’t really free: you’re paying with your privacy. As a paid service, we only serve you, our customer. This means we have no split loyalties, no mining of your personal data, no sharing it with third parties, and no ads, ever.
All the added eyes are European (Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway; Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden)
I mean to say, perhaps this is more about customer sentiment and image than something maybe benign to their profits like five eyes involvement.
So Australia may spy on data entering and leaving the Australian server that serves US customers, but they can't just seize the server based on the Five Eyes agreement.
BTW it's expanded to Fourteen Eyes and it's generally good to assume that all Western governments are cooperating to about this degree.
It's certainly giving them some benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that, say, the EU server and the US backup will in some time be an EU server and an EU backup.
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.
Instead, look to Exoscale, Proton, Infomaniak, or Scaleway.
Disclaimer: I work for one of 'em.
To believe your data is any better protected here or there is already unrealistic, and the admiration for the European Union for data privacy among hacker circles is unfounded. But if many people believe something false, you as a business should give them what they ask for and not try to educate them.
Any business that has strict guidelines won't touch this. As there's no real guarantee, and more importantly they have given themselves an out.
Whilst I like fastmail as a product, personally I would have waited to get everything in the EU before I launched this, as you've now got to relaunch it once you solve that last mile problem. Which is hard and costly.
Re-launching might be costly, but dropping millions more on a second location and splitting our systems more would hav been much riskier (note: many of our customers with 'fastmail.com' addresses have chosen the EU region, we can't segment MX records at a tighter boundary than domain level).
So we do what we can - when you login with username and password, the password is only sent to your region's server (based on a lookup from the username which MUST be global, so it works regardless of which of our servers you hit). If you send a username which doesn't exist, we distribute you to a random region in the same percentage, so you can't use it as an existence oracle.
To think that your data is safe in the EU while the EU is actively pursuing ID checks for social media and pushing Chat control every 6 months is delusional. No, your data is not safe here. If the EU wants it, it will get it.
This cult of the EU privacy needs to stop. The EU wants the same access that the US intelligence has but for some reason, some people don't believe it and defend tooth an nail this idea that things are better here.
Just so you are aware, Europol was lobbying to have access to all text messages/emails in the EU at will without a warrant as part of Chat Control V2. Say what you want about the 5 eyes countries, this is no better.
If tomorrow the EU wants access to your data, Fastmail will give it just like it will give it to the US, to the UK or to Australia.
So it "breaks end to end encryption" even with smtps and imaps apparently. The few emails I received weren't from tutamail users so presumably came over SMTP.
It's confusing to know what they mean because they confuse terms. They say emails are "stored end to end encrypted".
They don't pass my smell test
Did they say what's stopping them from using that (and requiring the encryption!)?
How would the lack of IMAP compromise encryption? Sounds dubious.
Lock-in effects are problematic, but separate from encryption or privacy in general.
If the concern is actually lock-in, it is worth noting: there is little lock-in in the current Tuta offering. The service allows users to export emails into standard EML files. If you decide to switch providers, simply point your domain to the new provider and import your latest backup.
I don't know about Tuta specifically, but Protonmail is practically intentionally hostile against anyone using their own keys. Which is the biggest sign that their marketing and actual intent do not align.
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.
I’m using that setup and have no issues with it, for exactly the use-case you mentioned.
Anyone who falls for this is a fool wanting to be fooled.
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.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...
[2] https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta199...
Wow, it's nothing. How about writing your PR after the data is not going to the US at all?
At this point it’s unclear what a future digitally sovereign infrastructure should look like. Even if a company or a European state somehow manages to store data that is out of reach for the US Government, an amendment to FISA or the Cloud Act is something that any Congress should be able to put together.
I use Fastmail but just consider it safe from third party advertisers. If I wanted safety from governments I would use something else, or at least encrypt my email contents.
They mention it only briefly in their publication. Their about page is clearer about that.
https://www.courthousenews.com/uk-faces-questions-on-complic...
https://nos.nl/artikel/2586859-aivd-en-mivd-delen-minder-inf...
Is there an alternative that really keeps data in the EU? (And not only in the sense it serves a sales promotion)
> Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland.
https://proton.me/blog/lumo-ai
They are moving to Germany, but will quickly find that they are going to face the same surveillance and privacy issues since the EU is in the process of negotiating a data sharing agreement under the US Cloud Act.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...
If that works fine if not, use another method of comm. Email wasn’t designed to be secure.
more: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers
mailbox.org can be avoided if you need to send and receive emails from domains where the mail admins might not be email admin savants and/or privacy activists (sometimes that's not a choice in case of Govt services etc and you may not live in a country when you can get those changes done). Also, if you ever face an issue and send them an email, expect the reply to come in weeks (if you are lucky) and that too a flippant (sometimes even terse) nothing-mail and then if you respond the cycle repeats until you give up.
I feel that that's the whole point. And the whole point of them making this article/advertisement.
Do you only send and receive emails with people in the EU?
As of now there's no guarantee of... anything, really.
Obviously if you decide to send an email to the US you're choosing to send your data there, that's a strawman.
In the moment that would be the Trump Administration for example.
If you advertise foolproof safes, but they end up not in fact being exactly that very thing you advertised then I'm sure you will have a great reason as to why actually your 'foolproof' safe can not be foolproof and you never guaranteed such a thing in your tos.
But at the end of the day, you promised foolproof safes, and you did not deliver.
Your argument is "well if you leave the lock open then...". And the reply to that argument is that "yes, we all know". The fact that I the user can make a mistake, does not excuse the company from saying "well, anyway, he would have made a mistake anyway so why bother"
So all of this is pointless.
In all seriousness though, what are the chances Fastmail won't require KYC at some point? I have sent them a support request with that question and got a non-answer.
PS: Am a paying customer for like a decade
I guess they could offer a 0GB storage option that only operated as a relay?
> Built by us, not rented from someone else
> We’ve installed our own servers, co-located in a secure facility in Amsterdam, set up by our own engineers. This new location is built to the same high standards as our existing infrastructure in Philadelphia and St Louis, with our own hardware and our own software — specified right down to the exact model of disks in each machine.
> In all our locations, data is stored encrypted at rest inside locked racks, and managed by our in-house team. We don’t rent computing or management services from a big cloud provider and pass on their assurances. That’s how we’ve approached privacy, reliability, and performance for more than 25 years.
In extreme cases the US DoJ can reach, let’s say the CEO/CTO arrest them or pick up family members in case of some sort of non-compliance in some criminal investigation.
I can imagine something like > US DoJ has some PoI with some account in Fastmail “EU region” > Fastmail says “sorry we’re GDPR” > US DoJ says “now” or… > Fastmail refuses
Then what?
mind you, prior to this administration the EU was more then happy to help the US DOJ in such cases.
considering the stuff that happened in the past year or so, i doubt that would happen again. Actually calling bluff on the US is the only way to play this properly, because it gives the EU a mandate to strike back geopolitically if the US wants to retaliate for non-compliance by fastmail.
Aussie law might be even worse than US; I would never use Fastmail.
"Resilient replicas of your data will live in the US"
?
I think "resilient" just means "backup copy" and I do think (IANAL) it is illegal to destroy emails when asked for them in the US.
Or was your comment ironic? Sorry, German, irony impaired.
* a physical thing that can only live in one place
* not copyable
* can be 'contained'.
The whole thing reeks of bureaucratic 'best practices' that just aren't.
Even worse than that, trying to keep email restricted to the EU (or anywhere else) means that you effectively wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone in a different region, which is kinda the whole point.
Why not just make your own internet next? and then you can disconnect from everyone else who is trying to hack you. Just pull your network plug.
Email itself is hopelessly insecure by design anyway. Not just metadata when you are E2EE everything inside the envelope, but even basic vulns like downgrade attacks are simple because it's literally a violation of the RFCs (so you're not spec-compliant) to require TLS or any other encryption.. Why? because requiring modern crypto might interfere with deliverability and backwards compatibility. The real, deeper reason is that email is from a kinder, simpler time (well, at least simpler) and the design goals were never updated to keep up with the times.
Email is what we have. Just understand its flaws and then use other tools where you can. And who cares where your email lives - it's too easy to break anyway.
I think the keywords are "trusted" and "citizens' rights". US burned a lot of trust in the last few years, and what's happening with ICE doesn't really scream "citizens' rights" either. I can see why many "trusted foreign partners" would now think twice rather than help out the US compared to just 5 years ago.
As a EU person, I'd really like to not have ties with US when possible, and I'd really like to foster the economy of non-US alternatives.