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Comment by deaux

7 hours ago

Data sovereignty is almost the default in Korea and common in Japan. It has been a common idea there for decades, in fact there are laws about it. The big corps there were plenty familiar with the CLOUD Act and such many years ago when 99.9% of EU corps couldn't give less of a shit. Percentages are completely different.

Joining of a forum is meaningless in itself, the actual actions of the governments and businesses in their usage vs abstinence of US clouds is ehat matters.

Joining a forum is meaningless in itself, but it's a pointer towards broader differences in attitudes towards enforcement. Japan is a big country which multiple companies I've worked for do business with, yet I've never had to take a training course about what I, not living or working in Japan, must do to comply with Japanese data protection law.

(Should I have had to, and companies just don't bother because Japan is smaller? I guess I'd believe that, although I'd still be surprised that I've never heard about a Japanese data enforcement action against a foreign company.)

  • > Japan is a big country which multiple companies I've worked for do business with, yet I've never had to take a training course about what I, not living or working in Japan, must do to comply with Japanese data protection law.

    Ironically another contrast with the EU; not talk but actions. Keeping things on prem, keeping it on local clouds. How many of the pure Japanese companies (not subsidiaries of foreign corps) you worked at had all their customer data on AWS/Azure/GCP? Unless you worked with a very specific subset of them, overall it's a much lower percentage than the EU. And then Korea is even a lot lower than that.

    Devil's advocate might say "well Japan is just like that because of other reasons, in reality they don't care about privacy or data protection". But a lot of those reasons are still linked to a broader idea of sovereignty, which is keeping things national.