EU playing silly buggas - minimal impact on AP

[Kym]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-to-u...tag=TRE17cfd61

The EU-niks, on the other hand, have decided to overreact, and in a big way. This week, the European Court of Justice overturned the long-standing US-EU Safe Harbor agreements. There's a ton of legal complexity and diplo-speak in what makes up the Safe Harbor deal, but it essentially allows American companies to store information belonging to Europeans on servers located in the United States.
What the European Court of Justice did this week is nuke that. They now claim that the Safe Harbor framework is invalid, which would -- and here's where it gets completely fuzzy -- seem to imply that American companies are not allowed to store European's data within the United States.


This is fuzzy because this is a diplomatic problem and if there is any one class of professional that makes a profession out of being unclear, unspecific, and non-committal, it's diplomats. For example, if you visit the U.S. Department of Commerce's Safe Harbor page, you'll see a very short statement acknowledging the ruling of "invalid" (Department of Commerce's quotes) and stating, "In the current rapidly changing environment, the Department of Commerce will continue to administer the Safe Harbor program."

So what happens to an Australian organisation storing data on a US based server and some of that data belongs to a EU based person? meh!

This is a general problem of the 'net. Especially for Cloud Services which include Flickr, Amazon, M$, Adobe etc.
Who knows where your stuff is being stored?

So the EU are getting heavy handed, but I reckon it will blow up in their face.

[Kym]

NB: We don't do that weird cookie warning on AP - even though we have members from the EU.
(goto to the BBC site for an example)

Again, more dumbness from the EU

[Warbler]

They'll be too busy learning Arabic to bother us here I think.

[Nick Cliff]

Kym I agree, how would photo hosting sites operate, the mind boggles.

[ameerat42]

Well, it certainly IS an opinionated piece of prose - and it's the style of prose that saves it from just being
water used for washing the porcine species.

What's he saying? Some message that is cloaked in derisiveness. The only "interesting" bit was the part about
how he handled the situation with the French lawyer. But is it a real example of the fallout he's portending?

Hoping to be regaled by a somewhat more informative piece, I followed the link in his last paragraph, starting with
"excellent work on..." --- and got led to a Google search. - Not that the dry and turgid text from the ??EU Commission
did much to shed any light on the real issue!!

So I finally found the fabled article by Zac - the first link in the article.

Well, did the EU have anything to be worried about that it made this move? Probably. They are NOT (at least yet
and in some sense) part of the US.

Oh, well! I guess we'll nevva know what really happens/ed

[Kym]

Well, did the EU have anything to be worried about that it made this move? Probably. They are NOT (at least yet
and in some sense) part of the US.

To me it is the EU being stupid. People and businesses can make a choice; they don't need a nanny state EU to say where stuff is hosted; that is a consumer choice.
If a US company offers an online service you can choose to use that service or not.
The 'net is global.

For businesses you can option local (in country) hosting. Eg. MS Azure or Amazon Web Services allow for Australian hosting - or not.

In my previous job it was an issue due to being a Govt Business Enterprise; we mandated Aussie hosting.
But other companies might not care.

The point being the EU are basically w*nk&rs when it comes to technological law. Eg. the cookie laws that are pointless. http://www.cookielaw.org/the-cookie-law/

People don't need a big brother EU govt making dumb laws