Do you know of any good alternatives with servers outside the US?
You're naive if you think hosting in Europe means you're necessarily any safer.
For (European) businesses, it's not the issue of safety, but the issue of compliance. If I (EU citizen) have personal data with EU company that stores said data on US-controlled servers, they are potentially viable for breach of data-protection laws. Since these laws are EU laws, it wouldn't be a problem if EU governments would read this data, since that's governed by the same set of laws.
Re:Switching from Gmail to FastMail
by steveklabnik on Friday July 19, 2013 @10:27AM
(#6070354)
It doesn't matter if clients are naive or not, it matters if they have a checkbook.
For us as a European business, that's a dealbreaker. It's not that we are completely paranoid and migrating off of American systems in a big hurry, but moving forward, not in the US and not owned by an American company is a requirement for any new service we use.
Even if we didn't care, we have to take into account our clients, and "no data under US control" has become not just a selling point, but a strict condition for many projects.
This was already very much the case before the PRISM scandal, and it's only going to get worse now.