Given that I am from Europe, when I host in the same country as I am from (ie. The Netherlands), I am only dealing with local law. The only problem I could have, is when I am dissident according to my country. I'm not though, and if I was I'd have to host in a country unfriendly to mine.
Fastmail is an Australian company. I don't believe Australia has strong privacy laws. EU, at least, has GDPR. For most people, The Netherlands is an excellent place to host your data.
If you consider non-US cloud services, you end up in Europe as well. For example Hetzner, Jottacloud, TransIP just to mention a few.
You should also ensure they use a local domain. For example, thepiratebay.org isn't local if you consider the service is from Sweden (and if its hosted in The Netherlands, neither is thepiratebay.se). Ik.me uses the .me ccTLD; Montenegro. Not a country known for its civil rights, AFAIK.
That being said, I don't believe in 'lifetime' either. Lifetime just means 'as long as we last'. Its a risk an early adopter takes to invest. If the service succeeds, yes they might have lifetime. If it fails, it was an expensive purchase.
Case in point: Emby. I bought a lifetime license. Then they changed to closed source in version 4, and it lead to me switching to the last 3.x fork, Jellyfin. License useless.
The weird thing here, is that they provide the e-mail supposedly lifetime and free. TANSTAAFL, so the default should be suspicion. They don't do advertising. What's their profit model?
Honestly, it depends where you are from.
Given that I am from Europe, when I host in the same country as I am from (ie. The Netherlands), I am only dealing with local law. The only problem I could have, is when I am dissident according to my country. I'm not though, and if I was I'd have to host in a country unfriendly to mine.
Fastmail is an Australian company. I don't believe Australia has strong privacy laws. EU, at least, has GDPR. For most people, The Netherlands is an excellent place to host your data.
If you consider non-US cloud services, you end up in Europe as well. For example Hetzner, Jottacloud, TransIP just to mention a few.
You should also ensure they use a local domain. For example, thepiratebay.org isn't local if you consider the service is from Sweden (and if its hosted in The Netherlands, neither is thepiratebay.se). Ik.me uses the .me ccTLD; Montenegro. Not a country known for its civil rights, AFAIK.
That being said, I don't believe in 'lifetime' either. Lifetime just means 'as long as we last'. Its a risk an early adopter takes to invest. If the service succeeds, yes they might have lifetime. If it fails, it was an expensive purchase.
Case in point: Emby. I bought a lifetime license. Then they changed to closed source in version 4, and it lead to me switching to the last 3.x fork, Jellyfin. License useless.
The weird thing here, is that they provide the e-mail supposedly lifetime and free. TANSTAAFL, so the default should be suspicion. They don't do advertising. What's their profit model?