Re: Great Data Purging Revolution
I couldn't decide whether to upvote you for the first bit. or downvote you for the second - so I've done neither.
I believe that GDPR has done something for privacy, just not as much and as fast as many had hoped. I believe it will come sooner or later.
The problem which you point out, that none of the big suspects such as FaecesBorg have been fined yet is that technically they haven't broken the law - because they've used mechanisms that have officially been endorsed by the authorities. First it was Safe Harbour until Shrems I killed that, then the hurriedly cobble together Privacy Figleaf until Shrems II killed that. But with the latter, there's still this "grey zone" while TPTB work out what to do. They can't ignore it, but equally there's a lot of pressure to avoid completely killing trans Atlantic trade - which would harm us as much as it would harm the US.
But in the interim, many services have improved their contractual terms and don't sell you without your permission - though that doesn't get round government snooping. Long term I think we'll see many more setting up the web of separate legal entities and technical barriers such that you'll be able to sign up for a service, and have some confidence in the data staying within the EU.
At the moment there isn't that confidence (at least amongst those with a memory longer than that of a goldfish), because Microsoft demonstrated the day after the CLOUD act was passed into law that people in the US could access and copy data from a server located in Ireland. Because of the complex way connections (especially for authentication) bounce around the globe, I'm not sure Microsoft can provide that guarantee with their current setup regardless of what they might claim publicly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
