Google, Apple, Facebook and friends go to great lengths to evade taxes. When it comes to tax matters, those companies have no hesitation to use all the tricks available to a trans-national company. And they pay very smart people to invent schemes that ensure a maximum amount of money is kept out of the US IRS hands.

If Google, Facebook and friends were truly serious about protecting their users' privacy, they would. They would pay very smart people to invent schemes that ensure a maximum amount of user data is kept out of the US NSA hands.

But they don't.

1. By law all European telecom providers, including ISPs, are required to provide a backdoor for everything that goes on on their networks (the infamous Data Retention Directive)

and

2. All European security agencies cooperate quite willingly with their American counterparts. Some more so than others (the ones from the former Eastern Block are particularly notorious in this regard) so if an American three letter agency wants your data, it'll get it.

It's simple: if it's passed through the USA, if you store it on a server in the USA or if it contains tags served from the USA you can bet that it's being tracked by one or more three letter agencies. To assume anything less would be folly given the amount of smoke that has been generated to date. To infer there is a fire somewhere is no feat of deduction.

The fact that there is now proof that at least some of these programs are real is only going to convince the last hold-outs, or at least, so I'd hope.

There is a very simple reason why that is a marketing point, and any of those vendors would have been happy to expand on it, and probably do on their websites. That reason is that compliance with German law requires certification that all steps you take with data comply with German law, which is much easier to do with a vendor which exists in a jurisdiction that has similar data privacy laws, and is easiest if that vendor is German.

For a random example, see http://www.perspecsys.com/how-we-help/cloud-data-privacy/ger....

Now before you cheer Germany for this stance, stop and think. Normally HN is very supportive of anything that reduces red tape barriers to small startups trying to innovate. The kind of regulations that we're talking about both protect users, and make life a lot harder for startups.

If your servers are in Germany, then they are the subject of German law - and all of their similar, respective search and data laws.

If you weren't aware of this before, you either weren't large enough for anyone to ask for your data, you were lucky enough to never have to deal with this request (or your software isn't really used for communication or data storage), or you were simply ignorant of the legal situation