US expected to publish Privacy Shield executive order next week
I spent a decade working with digitalisation in the public sector in Denmark and I doubt this will change a thing considering a executive order is too risky to rely on.<p>I&#x27;m a little torn on the issue because I value privacy, but currently we have a nice scandal going here in my country, which is essentially the former top intelligence boss of the military secret police, or whatever you&#x27;d call it in English, being accused of leaking state secrets. What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it&#x27;s not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way.<p>While the bureaucrats and lawyers discuss this, both the public and private sector suffers the financial consequences. We recently had a smaller scandal, where a town was told they couldn&#x27;t use their chromebooks, or their google education setup, for this years schooling. Essentially making it impossible for that city to teach, because so much of their setup relied on google education and they only had a month to find an alternative. You can argue privacy over this, but it&#x27;s sort of weird that one city, out of 30+ cities, were banned from using these tools while the others weren&#x27;t, and that they were banned from it because they fucked up their documentation.  I&#x27;m not going to defend google, but really, in this case we&#x27;re hurting the education of thousands of children over something silly. Because the alternative to google education isn&#x27;t going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn&#x27;t exist, it&#x27;s going to be Microsoft and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world issue.<p>There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it&#x27;s not like they are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in a worse alternative?<p>I&#x27;m a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it&#x27;s done in secret. But an executive order isn&#x27;t really going to help us, because who knows what the next American government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.