https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/cloudy-risks-gdpr Over the last year it has become more and more clear that non-EU Cloud services, including those from large US providers like Microsoft, Dropbox, Google, etc..., are not compliant with EU privacy regulations like the GDPR. The Dutch government recently concluded this and the Swedish National Procurement Service published, just last month, a pre-study report about Cloud based office platforms. [...] “The permitted purpose of surveillance under E.O. 12333 is quite broad, encompassing all activities and intentions of non-U.S. persons. This broad authority has resulted in broad surveillance programs, including ‘Co-Traveler’, through which the U.S. captured billions of location updates daily from mobile phones around the world, and ‘Muscular’, through which the NSA intercepted all data transmitted between certain Google and Yahoo! data centers outside the U.S.” [...] “We are particularly concerned with the possible disclosure by data brokers to governmental entities of metadata which, if sought by the government directly from a communications service provider, could not be disclosed to governmental entities without legal process.” [...] “De-anonymization techniques that can identify individuals by efficiently combining increasing large volumes of digital data” [...] “The extent of the government’s use of its surveillance authorities to target journalists, dissidents, and others not engaged in wrongdoing is not known. Nor is it publicly known whether surveillance of such individuals represents a significant portion of the government’s foreign intelligence surveillance efforts.” [...] Giovanni Buttarelli, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), stated in a recent interview: “At the moment there is too much power in the hands of a few mega tech companies and governments. We need to decentralise the internet, give more power to people over their digital lives. Engineers have a valid voice but they need to be part of a conversation with lawyers, ethicists, experts from the humanities. IPEN, our initiative, seeks to do this.”