US spying in Europe: Will it backfire on Google and Facebook?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/2013/1024/US-spying-in-Europe-Will-it-backfire-on-Google-and-Facebook

Angered by reports of US surveillance efforts in France, as well as spying on state leaders in Germany and Italy, the EU is considering a tough new law, which could put US firms in a sticky spot.

US spying in Europe: Will it backfire on Google and Facebook?
By Mark Clayton, Staff writer / October 24, 2013

A public backlash against reported US surveillance activities in France, Germany, and Italy could lead to tough new laws that put American technology companies in the tough spot of being forced to defy either US authorities or the European Union.

A new report by the French newspaper Le Monde claims that the National Security Agency (NSA) collected data on 70 million French phone calls and text messages from Dec. 10, 2012 to Jan. 8, 2013, while other reports say the NSA has monitored personal phone calls by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Premier Enrico Letta.

The revelations have revived EU legislation that would force companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, or Google to get approval from European officials before handing over data on European residents to US law enforcement – or face enormous fines.

If enacted, there could be sticky situations where “a US company would be faced with a valid request for data by US authorities and the EU is saying they can’t supply it,” says Christopher Wolf, a global privacy law expert at Hogan Lovells in Washington.

[bemildred]

1. It already has.

Technological advantages are wasting assets at best, what you can do, other people can do, and some of them better, and winner-take-all positional advantages such as Google and Facebook enjoy are even more ephemeral, once called into question.

[Eikers]

2. Not only Google and Facebook but all american IT companies

National authorities in the field of privacy- and data security in several European countries are currently reviewing licenses held by public services for the use of cloud computing services such as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. European companies are also increasingly looking into the details of their corporate clouds and how industrial secrets can be better protected.
As the scale of this monitoring is being uncovered, the resentment against it is likely to drive a demand for secured IT services that can guarantee the non-involvement and generally being out of range of the NSA. The economic impact on American cloud service giants related to PRISM has been predicted by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) to $35 billion by 2016. Forbes thinks "this estimate is too low and could be as high as $180 billion or a 25% hit to overall IT service provider revenues in that same time frame. That is, if you believe the assumption that government spying is more a concern than the business benefits of going cloud."