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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

> I assume Amazon can access data stored in any of their servers, right?

If you encrypt the data with your own key, they should not be able to access it.

Only if you encrypt before upload and decrypt after download, which renders almost all AWS/Azure/GCP services completely useless.

In-transit encryption protects you against this attack scenario specifically (if you own the keys obviously).

How so? Amazon, Google and Microsoft need access to your unencrypted data in order to provide most of their services (such as databases, analytics, machine learning). There's not much they can do with encrypted data. They can store it. They can pass it through. That's it.

This problem has to be solved on a political level. There is no technical fix and the legal workarounds appear to be exhausted.

My RDS data is stored encrypted on disks with a private key AWS operators has no access to [1] (or at least that's what they tell you), and the application layer connection is controlled by a password transmitted over a TLS-only connection, whose private key - again - AWS has no access to.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/securing-data-in-amazo...

You're decrypting data on Amazon's hardware using software provided by Amazon. Of course they can access your unencrypted data if they have to.

It comes down to the details of the legal obligation they have under U.S law. Are there limits to what they have to do to help U.S law enforcement, and what exactly are those limits?

The data in memory in that server is not encrypted. Amazon owning the server can log in it and read whatever part of the memory they want. I don't see how encrypting data at rest helps you in this scenario.

If GDPR makes all the cloud services provided by American companies illegal, what alternatives European companies have? Services like OVH and Hetzner are great as a low cost but they don't provide the same services at all.

How about Netsuite (Oracle), Netsuite, etc.?

My guess is that ~100% of European companies use some kind of US service and there are no realistic alternatives, are they going to rule all companies are doing something illegal?

Would creating competing services within Europe, falling under EU law, count as political or technical solution?

Creating "competing"* services does not solve the problem of how Europeans can continue to use U.S. services if and when they (we) prefer to do so based on technical merit.

I don't think it's a good idea to let the world (and the internet) fragment into ever smaller jurisdictions that can no longer find a way to trade with each other.

We need a legal agreement to sort this out or everyone will be worse off.

* They wouldn't actually have to compete at all if U.S services were banned.

Wouldn't Amazon still have access to metadata, e.g. connection info, IP addresses, etc?

Yes, that's absolutely right, and in fact about that I don't really know how the GDPR applies, and it's an interesting question to ask.

IP addresses (for connection setup) are personal data: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

You can process IP addresses without consent only if it is technically necessary: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... (paragraph b)

But you always (!) need consent to transfer personal data to a non GDPR compliant entity: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... (paragraph f)

To add: The reason why US companies can't be GDPR complaint is because of Article 5 and the conflict with the Cloud Act: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... (paragraph f)

"(1) Personal data shall be: (f) processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organisational measures (‘integrity and confidentiality’)."

Thanks, I'll scale this up to our compliance department, I'm curious about their answer now.

That last bit seems incompatible with how TCPIP works? Unless opening a connection in considered consent?

No, opening a connection and exchanging IPs falls under "technically necessary" processing of personal data.

But from a legal point of view we, as a European company, are forbidden to use any US infrastructure provider. We can't ask for consent to transfer data to an US based entity if our consent form itself is already hosted by an US based entity. And even if we did find a solution, like hosting the main infrastructure with a European company and asking for consent for some later data transfer, we are most likely forbidden to transfer data to US based entities at all.

From what my lawyer told me the ruling from https://noyb.eu/en/austrian-dsb-eu-us-data-transfers-google-... applies to all services from AWS, Google Cloud, ...

There will be many rulings that follow. Everybody is just waiting for the Irish Data Protection Commission to actually do its work, but the Irish DPC does not seem to be much in favor of data protection: https://noyb.eu/en/irish-dpc-handles-9993-gdpr-complaints-wi... & https://bigbrotherawards.de/en/2022/lifetime-achievement-iri...

This will change soon. From what I heard work is underway to let national data protection offices handle cases without the Irish DPC or force the Irish CPC to work.

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