
Ask HN: Which countries provide the best security/privacy protection? - jbaker_2sdw1
With all the recent political upheaval lately, I wanted to ask the YCombinator community, where is the best nation&#x2F;jurisdiction to host data and&#x2F;or servers that have the greatest &quot;security.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m a software nerd, so I don&#x27;t even know if I&#x27;m asking the right questions?? Is security different than privacy? Is data protection different than code protection? In starting a political activist organization, which countries provide the greatest legal protections?<p>There&#x27;s a particular reflex in saying that Europe has better privacy protection than the U.S, but I&#x27;ve heard credible counter-arguments from reputable sources, that in Europe the government doesn&#x27;t even need a warrant to grab records from a company??<p>I guess if I could summarize, for everything outside of actual software-hardware-nerdism, where are the best places to house&#x2F;build software systems that provide the greatest protection for political advocacy groups?<p>P.S: Is there a YCombinator website for legal nerds? I bet they would know the answer to this question haha.
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BjoernKW
While related security, privacy and data protection are all different matters
with varying degrees of protection in each jurisdiction. Code protection is a
matter of intellectual property law, which is only tangentially related to
those areas and in fact often is opposed to privacy laws and data protection.

Europe is a pretty big place. Not even all of Europe belongs to the EU, which
is often cited for good privacy laws. Indeed, when it comes to laws that
protect your privacy and your data against companies trying to do with your
data as they please, the EU does quite ok (with minor variations from country
to country). However, these laws can be excessive and overreaching at times.
Often they don't quite fit the reality of how business on the internet is done
but rather bureaucrats' idea of how business on the internet is done.

While this generally is true for each EU country, privacy protection against
the state and its agencies itself varies vastly from country to country.
Germany and the Netherlands for instance do quite well in that respect.
France, less so. The UK is arguably even worse than the US (thanks in part to
now-PM, former Home Secretary Theresa May and because of the Five Eyes
shenanigans in general).

As for non-EU members both Switzerland and Iceland do exceptionally well in
terms of privacy and data protection. As an added benefit, for a lack of
international involvement and a high degree of independency neither of those
two can be easily strong-armed by other state actors into bending laws or
surrendering data.

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ShadiElwan
Switzerland

