Software Companies Leaving UK Because of Government’s Surveillance Plans

The company that runs the open-source blog platform called Ghost is moving out its premium service from within the UK’s bounds because of Governmental plans to weaken protection for privacy and freedom of expression.

The founder of Ghost, John O’Nolan released online that the company is changing the default location from the UK to DigitalOcean’s Amsterdam datacenter.

He wrote that he was particularly worried by the UK government’s plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which he said enshrines key rights such as “respect for your private and family life” and “freedom of expression.” The Netherlands, by contrast, has “some of the strongest privacy laws in the world, with real precedents of hosting companies successfully rejecting government requests for data without full and legal paperwork”

A few weeks after hearing this news another company, this time Eris Industries decided they were going to react to the new UK plans. The company’s move was prompted by the threat that new laws could require backdoors in its encryption technology, of which the software heavily relies on.

The Ceo of Eris explained in a post:

“With immediate effect, we have temporarily moved our corporate headquarters to New York City, where open-source cryptography is firmly established as protected speech pursuant to the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” with further news to state that the move will be become permanent if the Snooper’s Charter is enacted with rules that require back doors to be in crypto software.

Thank you to ArsTechnica for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Telegraph