The post is from April, I'm reposting this because it's even more relevant now, with Australia's data retention due to take effect next week.<p>As a founder of an Australian startup that facilitates communication it's interesting to hear that using international hosting seems to bypass the requirements. IANAL etc. As the post mentions this is a pretty good way to discourage investment in local tech infrastructure.<p>Previous discussion : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345935" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345935</a>
This is old news (April this year) but it got picked up again because one of our politicians posted it as a guide to how the law is about to affect companies that have servers in Australia, vs those (like us) without infrastructure on-shore. It's a strange law!
I just wish Fastmail didn't have servers in the US. Not really quite sure what the benefit is there; email isn't latency sensitive.<p>If a Swiss company were to pop up with a competitive mail offering, I imagine they'd sweep up a lot of business easily eh? Not that it's much more secure, just harder to imagine Switzerland easily handing over records, whereas with folks like MS, they've shown they'll do it on even non-legal requests.
I generally like Fastmail and the for pay model, but their Employee Access to Data section of their Privacy Policy seems to be a bit too cavalier. I may just be naive though.<p>PP:<a href="https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html</a><p>Also, I feel they overstate the jurisdiction piece. Being in Australia is important, but it certainly doesn't make you a paragon of privacy or Australia a privacy
Eden. Company culture is great, but a five-eyes becoming more surveillance-heavy by the day doesn't make the technical aspects of maintaining private communication any easier. I'd be wary not to oversell.
Is FastMail an Australian company? I'm guessing maybe yes, since otherwise it seems such a post is unnecessary, but nowhere does it actually say anything like "You may think the law applies because we're an Australian company, but...". For all I know, this could be a law attempting to target any company, in any country, that does business with Australians.
While it's important to get legal advice, there are two things to bear in mind.<p>First, the meaning of a law can only be settled in the courts, strictly speaking. A legal opinion is a best effort, but it is an opinion, not a judgement.<p>Second, Parliament can amend any law it passes at will. And it has the power -- rarely but sometimes exercised -- to make its legislation retroactively effective.
I've been a Fastmail customer for almost two years now, its been working really great. The best thing with Fastmail is that it shows there is a future for a Internet with choices, choices beyond the 4 or 5 global cooperation that tries to dominate every aspect of our life.
I fail to see how this helps their users in any way, seeing as the data will be intercepted by NSA, GCHQ, or indeed ASD, retained wholesale (not just scraps of headers a.k.a. metadata) forever, and shared with whoever asks nicely?