I stumbled upon this article from the exellent NYOB organization - the one with Max Schrems - and they mention that a federated social network may be a possible way to avoid the current GDPR problem of transferring EU citizens data to the US.
Read the whole thing, but the relevant quote from the article:
Previously, Facebook / Meta spread the rumor that it would stop providing services in Europe. Given that Europe is by far the biggest source of income outside of the US and Meta has already built local data centers in the EU, these announcements are hardly credible. The long term solution seems to be some form of ‘federated social network’ where most personal data would stay in the EU, while only ‘necessary’ transfers would continue - for example when a European sends a direct message to a US friend. While Meta only got a short implementation period to come up with a solution, it knew about the legal situation for ten years and was already served with a draft decision in 2022.
That is not something I have seen discussed here before, so I thought it might be interesting as an additional reason for “Project 92”.
Transferring data from EU to US is a major GDPR issue, which has been ongoing since 2013. There is a brief overview here: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-us-data-transfers-0
Also consider supporting NYOB, they have done so much work to protect our privacy and get GDPR enforcement done!
Doubt it’s for the GDPR. The EU has been passing some other nice regulations on big tech lately, including the Digital Markets Act. Some things it does:
- It may prevent practices known as self-preferencing, applied by companies like Google for better displaying their products among the results of Google search.
- Gatekeeper companies could also be prohibited from reusing people’s personal data. For example, Facebook could be forbidden from using the data obtained from its subsidiary WhatsApp.
- The proposal ensures rights to the platform’s business users. For example, it could prohibit Apple from imposing a 30% commission on all the transactions concluded via App store.
- Gatekeepers platforms may also be prohibited from requiring business users to offer their best deals on the platform (for example Amazon required e-book publishers to apply their best conditions on the Amazon e-book marketplace).
- There are also device neutrality rules regarding the rights to delete pre-installed applications (as in the case of Apple iOS or Google Android for example) and to install apps from other sources.
- Protection rights for business users of platforms (including advertisers and publishers).
- Prohibition of some bundling practices.
- Provisions for ensuring a higher degree of data portability, interoperability, and access to data for the platform’s business and end-users.
- Companies that do not comply with the new obligations may risk fines up to 10% on their worldwide turnover.
The long term solution seems to be some form of ‘federated social network’ where most personal data would stay in the EU, while only ‘necessary’ transfers would continue - for example when a European sends a direct message to a US friend.
A social network could do this without federation, though. MySpace did it for their Chinese site 15 years ago - Data was only transferred between China and “the rest of the world” when needed.
