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.
The NSA / US govt are the ones we should be pissed at here, their data acquisition is what tanked Privacy Shield, that US companies doing business abroad depended on.
The way these systems typically work is that a US company builds its infra in the US, and gets economy of scale from shared infra, especially true for companies that run their own data centers. (Look at the map of Meta DCs).
The alternative is that you need to stand up a full copy of your infra (per what? In the limit, per country?) and that’s substantially more expensive, not to mention technically challenging. So the answer is simply that it was built the easy way, based on the assumption that the Privacy Shield treaty was sound.
Also, what does that even mean for an app like Meta? They are a graph. Where do the edges that span jurisdictions live? If a US user likes an EU user, is the “like” edge stored in the EU? There are reasonable answers to this sort of question, and the reasonable answers may overlap with how the regulators wrote the laws, or they may be mutually inconsistent with how other regulators wrote the laws.
It seems quite likely that the end state is as you describe, but I think around here of all places there should be a deep understanding of how hard it is to split your system like this.
Keep US data of US citizen on US servers, and same for EU side. It's not like Meta can't afford servers on both sides of the ocean.