When Europeans communicate with Americans as expected on a social network, where does the data live?
Keeping the data solely in Europe only seems relevant for people who have no American friends who read their posts. As soon as there’s one American in the conversation, or even just someone visiting the US, it’s going to be delivered to the US.
Also consider that posts are often reshared.
To make this effective, it seems like there would need to be region restrictions in the UI? If there were a “Europe only” checkbox, how many would use it?
And Meta is so determined to do this that they're threatening to leave the EU. So again...what exactly is being done with this data that is impossible on EU turf but possible on US turf? I personally can't think of anything Kosher
When there are hundreds of millions of Americans who are subscribed to the feeds of hundreds of millions of Europeans, and the Americans' feeds are generated via server-side queries, that seems roughly equivalent to a bulk transfer? It's querying a cache, at least, which is going to look rather like a database.
I suppose they could serve all the Americans' queries out of Europe, but that's going to affect costs and latency, and the data still ends up in the US.
I don't know what's going on at Meta, but possibly, they have a lot of technical debt and doesn't want to do a big rewrite of many of their systems for dubious benefits?
And there would also be the issue of having lots of Americans' data in European jurisdiction.
So it seems like what we're seeing here is supposedly "borderless" computer systems running up against legal realities. I suppose if it resulted in a breakup, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be expensive.
Keeping the data solely in Europe only seems relevant for people who have no American friends who read their posts. As soon as there’s one American in the conversation, or even just someone visiting the US, it’s going to be delivered to the US.
Also consider that posts are often reshared.
To make this effective, it seems like there would need to be region restrictions in the UI? If there were a “Europe only” checkbox, how many would use it?