Facebook<\/a> and Instagram parent Meta have said the European Union\u2019s Digital Services Act amounts to censorship of their platforms.<\/p>\nEU officials say the Act will make the online environment safer by compelling tech giants to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material.<\/p>\n
Greg Nojeim, director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Europeans\u2019 concerns about the U.S. government accessing their data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified.<\/p>\n
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Not only does U.S. law permit the government to search devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure of data that Europeans outside the U.S. store or transmit through U.S. communications service providers, Nojeim said.<\/p>\n
Mission impossible?<\/p>\n
Germany\u2019s new government is itself making efforts to reduce exposure to U.S. tech, committing in its coalition agreement to make more use of open-source data formats and locally-based cloud infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Regional governments have gone further \u2013 in conservative-run Schleswig-Holstein, on the Danish border, all IT used by the public administration must run on open-source software.<\/p>\n
Berlin has also paid for Ukraine to access a satellite-internet network operated by France\u2019s Eutelsat instead of Musk\u2019s Starlink.<\/p>\n
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But with modern life driven by technology, \u201ccompletely divorcing U.S. tech in a very fundamental way is, I would say, possibly not possible,\u201d said Bill Budington of U.S. digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.<\/p>\n
Everything from push notifications to the content delivery networks powering many websites and how internet traffic is routed relies largely on U.S. companies and infrastructure, Budington noted.<\/p>\n
Both Ecosia and French-based search engine Qwant depend in part on search results provided by Google and Microsoft\u2019s Bing, while Ecosia runs on cloud platforms, some hosted by the very same tech giants it promises an escape from.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, a group on messaging board Reddit called BuyFromEU has 211,000 members.<\/p>\n
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\u201cJust cancelled my Dropbox and will switch to Proton Drive,\u201d read one post.<\/p>\n
Mastodon, a decentralised social media service developed by German programmer Eugen Rochko, enjoyed a rush of new users two years ago when Musk bought Twitter, later renamed X. But it remains a niche service.<\/p>\n
Signal, a messaging app run by a U.S. nonprofit foundation, has also seen a surge in installations from Europe. Similarweb\u2019s data showed a 7% month-on-month increase in Signal usage in March, while use of Meta\u2019s WhatsApp was static.<\/p>\n
Meta declined to comment for this story. Signal did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.<\/p>\n
But this kind of conscious self-organising is unlikely on its own to make a dent in Silicon Valley\u2019s European dominance, digital rights activist Robin Berjon told Reuters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe market is too captured,\u201d he said. \u201cRegulation is needed as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[82400,82388,82393,2000,82396,299,5187,82391,82399,1699,82401,82398,82394,82395,82402,82392,82390,82397,82389],"class_list":{"0":"post-204476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-buyfromeu-reddit","9":"tag-digital-sovereignty-europe","10":"tag-ecosia-search-engine-europe","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-eu-digital-services-act-impact","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-european","15":"tag-european-digital-services-alternatives","16":"tag-european-search-alternatives","17":"tag-european-union","18":"tag-mastodon-user-growth","19":"tag-open-source-software-germany-government","20":"tag-protonmail-usage-europe","21":"tag-signal-app-growth-europe","22":"tag-signal-app-user-trends","23":"tag-topio-berlin-privacy","24":"tag-trump-presidency-europe-tech","25":"tag-us-data-privacy-laws-europe","26":"tag-us-tech-influence-europe"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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