Apple to Spend Almost $2 Billion on European Data Centers
This is the indirect harm that the NSA rules are causing to our country. This is jobs fleeing overseas. Whether this problem is due to real or just perceived vulnerabilities to NSA snooping doesn’t really matter at this point - we have to make changes if we don’t want all multi-national corps to migrate their data centers to safer locales.
Hoping to better satisfy customers data privacy desires Apple looks likely to join other U.S. companies in flocking to Europe’s shores. On Monday, the U.S. tech giant announced plans to spend US $1.9 billion on new data centers in Denmark and Ireland that would go live in 2017.
The move comes in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks that revealed the U.S. National Security Agency’s efforts to cast a surveillance net in the world’s digital data streams. Snowden’s leaks included information about NSA spies secretly tapping the communication links between the servers of U.S. companies such as Google and Yahoo. As a result, several firms have begun setting up data centers in Europe so that they can reassure customers about data privacy within Europe’s tighter regulatory environment, said Patrick Van Eecke, a lawyer specializing in e-commerce at DLA Piper, in a Wall Street Journal interview.
Europe has proven attractive for companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Salesforce because of its strict data privacy rules that protect the personal information of customers. Such rules may only grow more strict after the Snowden leaks revealed the extent of the spying done by the NSA and its UK counterpart; the European Union is debating the possibility of fines for data protection rule violations of up to $114 million or 5 percent of revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal
More: Apple to Spend Almost $2 Billion on European Data Centers - IEEE Spectrum