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Comment by johndhi | Hacker News Reader

You know what's funny?

Literally any use of any technology that requires transfer of any EU personal data to a company that has any presence in the United States, is currently illegal for anyone in Europe.

But we're playing this silly game where data protection authorities slowly realize "oh - Google - they have US presence right? Let's ban them," and then this flows down to EU businesses.

The reality is the law is clear: any use of ... Google... AWS... MSFT (even with EU hosting)... Notion... Salesforce... GitHub... Atlassian... All of this is currently obviously illegal in EU.

So we now live in a weird world of, everyone is breaking the law, who do we call on it?

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> So we now live in a weird world of, everyone is breaking the law, who do we call on it?

Welcome to today's world.

This is the case, not just for corporations, but for individuals. Chances are near 100% that everyone breaks some law, every single day. This gives the State the power to prosecute you for thousands of offenses, if they so choose. There are thousands of laws, and normal lay people cannot possibly know about all of them. Moxie once wrote a fantastic blog piece on this I recommend reading: https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...

> For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

This is just one absurd example out of thousands. And this is precisely how the State maintains coercive power over people. Everyone breaks some law, so the State can pick and choose whom to go after based on whatever random reason triggers some bureaucrat's or cop's ire.

Salesforce, Atlassian, GitHub and to a lesser extent Google, Microsoft and Amazon are only not allowed for private data, no? So there's nothing wrong with storing code on GitHub for instance. Although IPs are private data, do access logs count? If i recall correctly they don't, but I'm really not a lawyer.

Edit: Actually Atlassian are an Australian company, is there an equivalent CLOUD act that makes data transfers impossible?

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