The Dutch government relies on American technology companies for virtually all of its digital services. All Dutch municipalities use Microsoft products such as Office 365, Teams, and Azure for their daily operations. This dependence is so deep that only 9% of the municipalities consider a switch to other suppliers feasible, writes Binnenlands Bestuur. The use of Microsoft cloud services in particular is widespread - from email to storage of sensitive documents. The recent police hack, made possible by weak security in Microsoft Outlook, shows how vulnerable this dependence makes us. In this hack, the data of 65,000 police officers was stolen. The lack of in-house IT expertise within the government makes it difficult to develop alternatives. Furthermore, there are few SaaS solutions that support 'bring your own cloud', which limits adoption by (semi-)government organizations. This situation did not arise through a conscious choice, but through years of lack of investment in digital infrastructure, according to Tweakers magazine.

When America has dominated much of the world's IT infrastructure but is now led by an orange fascist butt plug - this is what happens.

Some NL based medical companies also have stored extremely sensitive data overseas. The rule is: comply (and don't use foreign cloud solutions) or explain. I've read the explanations of a couple. They perfectly explain: we wanted this, it's cheaper in the short run, clouds are just so convenient, it's such a big company we don't really need an exit strategy. Wow great explanation y'all 😅! I guess all of the transfolk have totally nothing to worry about, cool!

I shared a story of some international gay adventures I had in darkrooms to a Dutch governmental health organization so my STD check would be free (I believe all STD checks should be free forever and everywhere, so embellished every and all details so I would be marked as high risk). Let's see how long it takes for that to finds its way back to me through DOGE or some other murican garbage institute :).

I'm so incredibly proud of my government for using SolidPods to store citizen data. Something our northern neighbours should've done too apparently. That's a scary article.

GDPR should prevent any tomfoolery, but if I was dutch I'd be pretty scared atm.

Looks like some people just don't learn from history.

I remember reading a blog post about how the Dutch kept meticulous records on citizens in the 1930s, including things like which synagogues people attended. Needless to say, that information became very interesting and useful to the visitors that arrived later in that decade. When comparing occupied countries during the Holocaust, the Netherlands probably was the country where the Nazis were the most successful in rounding up victims.

I can't find the exact blog post where I read this - I'm pretty sure it was on tutanota's blog, but I can't find it at the moment. Wikipedia however does include this line:

Several factors contributed to The Netherlands' higher death toll compared to other occupied countries. The governmental apparatus was left relatively intact after the royal family and government fled to London, and The Netherlands was not under a military regime. It was the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for fleeing or hiding. The country did not have much open space or forest for people to flee to. Also, the civil administration had detailed records of the numbers of Jews, and their addresses.

And now, they're making the same mistake again it seems.

Some European governments are using non-American services, right?

Guess how many tonnes of gold the Dutch have stored in the US...