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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Nice, but you still can't use this for your privacy-aware customers.

Care to elaborate on why not?

Depends whether he means "You can't use any SaaS IaaS datastore for privacy-aware customers" or "Google itself is less trustworthy than (AWS or [insert competitor here]).

The former is a valid position - if a fairly harsh one in the current tech landscape. If the latter however - I'd like to see a more fleshed out explanation as I don't see Google being much of an outlier on this front.

Storing data in a database that is managed by a third-party is something that some customers explicitly forbid.

Wouldn't that mean you can't use any cloud data services with any company? Or even cloud hosting? What kind of customers forbid this?

Are you kidding me? This is a very common requirement and one of the reasons larger institutions are building out their own clouds. It's not a requirement for everyone of course, but it's certainly a common theme.

Many in the financial services or healthcare industry. Some of those industries have requirements far in excess of both SOX and HIPAA combined due to SEC scrutiny.

> What kind of customers forbid this?

Government entities, for instance.

https://www.google.com/work/apps/government/

Google has a dedicated cloud environment for governmental agencies: http://googleforwork.blogspot.pt/2009/09/google-apps-and-gov...

> We look forward to working with governments across the country on these exciting initiatives in the months ahead.

So what about foreign governments?

Heard of encryption?

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