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Russia Threatens To Shut Down Facebook Over Local Data Storage Laws (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook Inc. will be shut down in Russia next year if it fails to comply with requirements to store user data locally, according to the head of Russia's state communications watchdog. "The law is mandatory for everyone," Alexander Zharov told reporters Tuesday. Roskomnadzor will be forcing foreign internet companies to comply or shut down in the country. President Vladimir Putin signed a law in 2014 that requires global internet firms to store personal data of Russian clients on local servers. Companies ranging from Alphabet Inc.'s Google to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd complied, while others like Twitter Inc. demanded extra time to evaluate the economic feasibility of doing so.
They need FB for the mid terms, and certainly for the 2020 presidential election.
Social Media blocks you!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
'Way back, western gov'ts, businesses, and the chatty classes sold us the idea that trading with oppressive and repressive regimes would open them up to freedom of speech and rights and so on. Many or most of these regimes just used the technology they acquired to tighten the screws. Worse, we in the West have become lightly dependent on the economics from these nasty regimes. Worse yet, some western companies participate in the repressions directly. It's really time for companies like FB, Microsoft, Google, Cisco et al. to take a stand and stand up to these bullies. 'And we should back them.
If the NSA can read everything, why not the rest of the world.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I know it isn't a simple solution. Sure the legal framework that embassies operate under might not be ideal, so make a new framework. Not a simple thing to do, but with growing international interest in controlling data and corporations resistant partly due to economic reasons something like this could potentially be a good compromise.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
This is the biggest problem that social media companies face. How to protect not only their business interests but also the people behind the data. At one level you are giving dissidents a platform to speak, but also a platform for raw propaganda. On the other hand you are storing a social map that will make rounding up and executing or imprisoning so much easier. I don't envy their position but a lot of people have pointed out that something should have been done about these issues years ago.
once more into the breach
There are a lot of places that enacted laws that require data to be stored on local servers to that country. Russia, and the EU require this. China requires not just this, but 51% ownership of any venture on their soil.
What is surprising is that the US doesn't have these rules. Critical info on US citizens can be stored anywhere, even a hostile nation that would use that info for its economic or military gains.
I hope Facebook responds by never accepting another Russian funded ad. Not just the Russian propaganda machine will be thwarted in the US, but also Europe, and any other place Facebook has a presence. The Russian audience, by contrast, is minuscule, and Russia is just a big gas station with outdated weapons for export.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I never understood why this isn't already a thing. If a previous article is to be believed, Data is the new oil, so why would any sovereign nation just allow a foreign company come and drain all of your natural resources?
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is Nadia!
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Nadia is only 5,884.3 miles from you!
Hookup with Nadia tonight!