Original story discussed two days ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289381" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289381</a>
Just for a little context, I think it's worth mentioning that this news comes to light when Canadians are thinking quite a bit about companies lobbying the gov't, as a bit of a scandal is brewing with the current liberal gov't[0].<p>This news implicates the former conservative gov't, and might quickly become a talking point for the current liberal gov't.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-scheer-calls-for-full-disclosure-as-trudeau-denies-pmo-directed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-scheer-call...</a>
From the article:<p>> Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs, in exchange for the federal government offering assurances that it would not impose its jurisdiction over the company's non-Canadian data.<p>The Canadians agreed to not regulate other countries data. This seems pretty reasonable. Why should the Canadian government regulate how an American tech company handles German data? It makes a lot more sense for each country to have jurisdiction over data from (1) its own citizens, (2) residents on its soil or (3) data physically stored on its soil.<p>That this was a result of "lobbying" or "pressure" is supposed to rile us up, but this type of thing could not be more common in the political world. FB, one of the 10 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, would be stupid not to engage in global lobbying.
> > Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs<p>The idea that a datacenter creates a lot of good paying jobs is almost 90% bullshit. There is a brief burst of construction and trades related jobs when it's being built. But after that, all of the software engineering and systems engineering is going on elsewhere. Companies have no need to pay their high six figure salary staff to relocate to Quincy, WA.<p>The number of people you need to do maintenance activities like rack and unrack equipment, swap hard drives, swap fans and power supplies is really minimal. Like, a rotating shift of six people for a huge facility. And those persons don't need to be very expensive salary wise. I've seen persons who were previously $16/hour Comcast TV installers successfully recruited into entry level datacenter technician jobs.
> Facebook promised to open a data centre in Canada to create jobs, in exchange for the federal government offering <i>assurances that it would not impose its jurisdiction over the company's non-Canadian data</i>.<p>This should not be legal in the first place.
Its embarrassing to have your sovereign government changing its policy for a social media company's data center.<p>We need to create our own jobs, give smart people a good reason to stop moving to the states.
What exactly is Canadian data? Is it data generated by Canadian citizens? What if people change citizenships? Is it data generated by all people on Canadian soil? What if you post something while transiting the Arctic Circle in an airplane? How does it include relationships between Canadians and non-Canadians? 90% of Canadians live along the U.S.-Canada border. Does data partially derived from Canadians count (e.g. ML models)? I read the article and it was not clear how the lines were drawn and how they will evolve with time.<p>Pretty sure this messiness is both why Facebook does not want the government to be enforcing privacy rules, and why the government wishes to do so in the first place.
The Canadian government better stay off greasing these tech companies or it would lose in the upcoming elections.<p>Canada likes tech, but it also values privacy.
normally these big tech companies have something mildly redeeming about them. google has a huge presence in oss, apple cares about privacy, etc. but it seems facebook has nothing. even their outreach into third world countries was a thinly veiled attempt to lock more users into their platform.