I wonder if we will now see a situation where British companies will be forced to move their cloud out of GB, to i.e. Ireland if they want to do business with the rest of Europe ?
The thing is, even though the GB decides to ditch GDPR, they're still bound by it if they want to do business with the rest of Europe, just like the US is bound by it.
With the difference that companies can now move Britons into the cohort of users whose data you can sell and do things with you probably didn't quite consent to in any meaningful way. And as Europeans we will probably get a couple more websites that will just tell us to sod off (in proper British English parlance now) because of our data protection laws. You know, the kind of message that already pops up when you search for some recipe and end up on an American website with good SEO or some topic featured on a local news outlet in the US.
It's already happening. I work with a few affiliate platforms, amd many of them sent an email requesting me to update my invoices. They moved to Germany or some other EU country.
We are counting on this. Actually investments in Sweden for data centers has rissen more than 20-40 percent at the normal rate.
I know that some purchases of cloud services are halted for now to be sure about this. Data movement is going to be increasingly an important matter. It should have been from the begining but here we are.
Organisations which receive and hold any of regulated data types to follow the GDPR requirements. According to GDPR, companies have to keep the data secure inside the EU and if the data is to be transferred outside of the UE, then it can only be transferred to countries or organisations that have signed up to equivalent privacy protection."
So the EU has all the power here to say that the UK doesn't meet their standards and require businesses to transfer their data.
However, I would guess that most international organisations would have already moved their EU customer data out of the UK.
There were years of uncertainty with the Brexit negotiations, keeping data in the UK would have too much risk.
Plus many other countries have data residency laws, so it's not like a foreign concept to international businesses.
The thing is, even though the GB decides to ditch GDPR, they're still bound by it if they want to do business with the rest of Europe, just like the US is bound by it.