Facebook says it may quit Europe over ban on sharing data with US
www.theguardian.com
EU court in July ruled there were insufficient safeguards against snooping by US intelligence agencies

Is anyone else really curious about how this might positively impact software/the web? I’m sure people can come up with efficiency bogeymen, but I can see

  • local stuff adapted for local needs/cultures
  • federated software getting a real boost to whatever extent it can avoid caching other servers’ data[1] to be compliant–then you can just have your stuff live in your Lithuanian provider and pull across dank Canadian memes
  • broadly better practices around cellular / partitioned infrastructure

We should all be skeptical of markets as a force for good in any situation, but I can’t help thinking some shattering (nay, might I say… “disruption”?) of “natural monopolies” will lead to there being local demand that can spur innovation for cooler things.

  1. I believe Pleroma doesn’t store images, for instance, just pulls them from the origin server. Lots of perf concerns with these approaches but perhaps potential ↩︎