Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. I clicked through the article to see the "justification" since LinkedIn is extremely tame. For example, imagine if LinkedIn were banned from the United States - why would that happen? Well it could happen if a court ordered it to stop impersonating its users, it didn't stop and kept impersonating then, and then the court ordered it to be shut down as punishment. Kind of far-fetched, but not that far-fetched. Everyone knows LinkedIn illegally impersonated its users.

So I was wondering what the justification would be here. So I clicked through. I didn't see the full article, but this is what I found "a court blocked the professional networking service for flouting local laws that require internet firms to store data on Russian citizens within the nation’s borders."

So question: why didn't it store data on its citizens within the nation's borders?

It doesn't seem that far-fetched of a requirement to me. Doesn't Germany have the same requirement?

I didn't Google in-depth but found this language (about Germany) "20. What rules regulate the transfer of data outside your jurisdiction? The Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) differentiates between transfer of personal data within the EU/EEA and outside the EU/EEA."[1]

Isn't this more or less the same thing?

While I'm not defending Russia's actions (according to a Reddit user journalists are jailed, Putin's opposition opponent is in a Russian graveyard with 5 bullets in him, etc etc), but this seems like something that Linkedin could have complied on?

Or is there more to the story?

[1] http://uk.practicallaw.com/3-502-4080

I'd imagine at a technical level, forcing all Russian citizen data to reside on Russian servers would mean running a federated/sharded system. It seems like a non trivial challenge. A lot of their code would need to have the concept of locality. Running an algorithm to suggest friends or rank users? Now it needs to be changed to deal with not having Russian users' data accessible in the same way. There's probably elegant solutions but why bother if you can avoid it?

Perhaps they thought they could win a legal fight. Or they wouldn't suffer enforcement actions, or public outcry will save them.

What I really mean is that I expect there's some deeper or other reason. This isn't really that big of a deal-breaker if it's only the reason cited. The technical challenges you cite certainly mean this isn't a 2-hour affair but it doesn't sound like LinkedIn would be allowed back in as soon as Russian user's data is on servers there instead of elsewhere...

I'm from Germany I can see Linked In in the appstore. Since 2000 there are Safe Harbor laws in place that regulate how data can be stored in the US etc. altough their privacy standards don't match EU and especially German standards. My government was thinking about changing those contracts during the NSA scandals but AFAIK we're stuck in negotiations atm.

By the way those negotiations are a farce since our intelligence services will hand the data right over to the NSA anyways.

To be pedantic, Safe Harbour died in 2015. The replacement is the EU-US Privacy Shield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU-US_Privacy_Shield

Indeed, and this "Privacy Shield" is already being challenged in European courts:

http://www.natlawreview.com/article/legal-challenge-to-eu-us...

The bigger question to be asked here is, with China demanding the removal of the NYT app, and Russia demanding the same for LinkedIn, how long before Trump orders Signal or Telegram to be removed?

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