Over the weekend of 16th/18th of October 2020, we moved our servers from the US to the EU, thus improving, and hopefully simplifying, GDPR compliance for our users (and ourselves).

When we originally started developing Mind My Business in late 2014 GDPR did not exist and, whether rightly or wrongly, it was generally felt that EU data stored in the US was protected under the Safe Harbour agreement in place at that time. Soon afterwards this was challenged in the European courts and a new agreement called Privacy Shield was put in place. Many criticised this as being equally inadequate. Most recently SCCs (Standard Contractual Clauses) were developed.

It seems that we Europeans do not trust the US with our data. This has been particularly pursued by an Austrian by the name of Schrems who won his first case against Facebook in Ireland in 2015. A further judgement was reached on 17th July 2020, details of which can be read here Schrems II ruling.

While this latter ruling established SCCs as being adequate, they come with an administrative overhead for all involved and many in the industry believe it is only a matter of time before these are struck down. So at Mind My Business we decided that, rather than enter into or even impose an SCC on each of our customers, we would get out ahead of this and move our servers to the EU. We started working on this together with our hosting partners, Foresoft, immediately after the Schrems II decision. We would like to take this opportunity to give particular thanks to the fantastic team at Foresoft for the commitment, patience and incredible support in getting this project over the line.