On the 13th of January 2022, the privacy authority in Austria decided that Google Analytics is illegal.
Data and server location are critical for this ruling (1). Google Analytics sends personal data to US-based companies’ servers, which implies the right for US intelligence services to access them. That is not GDPR compliant, so it is illegal to use for European data subjects.
The privacy activist Max Schrems and his organization NOYB can add this ruling to their successful track record of having big impact (2): the reasoning for the judgment is applicable for nearly every BigTech US-based cloud provider.
In his blog, Bart van den Brande of Sirius Legal says a hugely practical and economic problem for thousands of European companies is being created. The opposite of that statement is true: the cathedrals for the real cloud revolution will rise further. They are a foundation for sustainable prosperity in the digital age.
When software developers deploy their work on Threefold Cloud, they can choose the servers for their data and workloads, which independent Threefold farmers own.
In his blog, Bart van den Brande argues that Google Analytics is illegal because of a very small and purely theoretical legal problem. I’m afraid I have to disagree again. The Google Analytics case shows that sovereignty matters and needs solutions.
But the existing cloud industry faces more challenges if we want sustainable prosperity for the digital age.
That’s why Threefold has been building it from the ground up for more than 15 years now. It’s available for us to start using. A link to a deep dive talk to get started is here. Listen to the overall architecture here.
You go first. You lead.
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(1) Click here to a recording of an in depth seminar with Max Schrems on the EU-US data transfer saga.
(2) Click here to talk by Max Schrems, why I sued Facebook over their data collection.