Ask HN: Which popular companies/startups are based in privacy-conscious EU

3 points·mknits··4 comments

Ever since the PRISM scandal, I'm making a list of alternatives of Dropbox, Google, Yahoo, Outlook/Microsoft, Skype etc. which host their data in privacy-conscious European countries. Any little information or suggestion will be useful.

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The UK is in the privacy-conscious EU and apparently (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/24/gchq-tempora-...) taps all the internet traffic going in or out of Europe. So you may not be on to a winner with this approach :-(

Still, there are a bunch of cloud comapnies listed at http://www.eurocloud.org.uk//Member-Directory?filter=all

And http://prism-break.org is a good resource for better alternatives in general.

The UK is covered by the Data Protection Act of 1998:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998

The first paragraph mentions:

it was enacted to bring UK law into line with the EU data protection directive of 1995 which required Member States to protect people's fundamental rights and freedoms and in particular their right to privacy with respect to the processing of personal data

Having said that, US privacy laws did not stop the NSA from snooping. I don't wanna think about how much control the MI5 or MI6 have over UK's network connectivity. Being a small island I cannot imagine it being hard to control.

The question I'm asking as european citizen is: Which european country is actually privacy-conscious? Germany has strong privacy legislature, however there are daily reports of the government or intelligence services simply ignoring them. I consider pulling the Berlusconi on a law (making another law with loopholes) as ignoring.

We are based in Germany, not yet popular but at least, it feels good to be here and have our server also hosted here with a German company (hetzner) .

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