

Ask HN: Which popular companies/startups are based in privacy-conscious EU - mknits

Ever since the PRISM scandal, I&#x27;m making a list of alternatives of Dropbox, Google, Yahoo, Outlook&#x2F;Microsoft, Skype etc. which host their data in privacy-conscious European countries. Any little information or suggestion will be useful.
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ciderpunx
The UK is in the privacy-conscious EU and apparently
([http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/24/gchq-
tempora-...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/24/gchq-tempora-101))
taps all the internet traffic going in or out of Europe. So you may not be on
to a winner with this approach :-(

Still, there are a bunch of cloud comapnies listed at
[http://www.eurocloud.org.uk//Member-
Directory?filter=all](http://www.eurocloud.org.uk//Member-
Directory?filter=all)

And [http://prism-break.org](http://prism-break.org) is a good resource for
better alternatives in general.

------
Sealy
The UK is covered by the Data Protection Act of 1998:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998)

The first paragraph mentions:

 _it was enacted to bring UK law into line with the EU data protection
directive of 1995 which required Member States to protect people 's
fundamental rights and freedoms and in particular their right to privacy with
respect to the processing of personal data_

Having said that, US privacy laws did not stop the NSA from snooping. I don't
wanna think about how much control the MI5 or MI6 have over UK's network
connectivity. Being a small island I cannot imagine it being hard to control.

------
linohh
The question I'm asking as european citizen is: Which european country is
actually privacy-conscious? Germany has strong privacy legislature, however
there are daily reports of the government or intelligence services simply
ignoring them. I consider pulling the Berlusconi on a law (making another law
with loopholes) as ignoring.

~~~
Concours
We are based in Germany, not yet popular but at least, it feels good to be
here and have our server also hosted here with a German company (hetzner) .

