What about Geo-centralization requirements?

@Alexey, as Storj grows, do you think that you could run into issues with the Russian Government that data for Russian citizens cannot be guaranteed to be located in the Russian Federation like Linkedin has done?

The customers in Russia who offer public services for Russian citizens would not use Storj DCS to store private data. This is true for any European company in the Europe with the similar service for European citizens. This is also true for California citizens and many other, who need to be compliant with GDPR, HIPPA, and other similar requirements.

If your company doesn’t store private data of Russian citizens - you can use the Storj DCS freely in Russia.

As a person I can store my personal data where I want. I cannot be sure for the next few month though - we have unpredictable law system with strict rules, but “The severity of laws in Russia is redeemed by the optionality of their execution”.

From the technical point of view - data in Storj DCS would be stored nearly the customer (by network meaning, not necessarily geo-nearly).

I think those requirements of geo-centralization must be reviewed for decentralized systems with encryption by default - it makes store data more reliable and in the same time nobody except you can decrypt this data, so the personal information is secure.

3 Likes

Yeah, Kaliningrad would be a particular interest point as an example. But I have no idea how Russia does the WAN links to the city in that situation. Do they cross Europe? Undersea only?

You can use traceroute utility to see that.
You can create a customer account on the satellite and try to upload, you can see in the logs - what IPs are used. Then you can check how the route to come to there.
I believe the in-country traffic is routed by nearest hubs inside the country - so if you have enough nodes around - they will be used at most. However some pieces would be in Asia (if you still located in Omsk), even in a New Zeeland or Australia.

I would expect that storj implements that feature at some point. It is possible. Even now it would be possible. I see 2 possible solutions.

  1. With current implementation setup a new satellite in that region. Storage node identities needs to be signed. At the moment we use one signature for all satellites. We could use multiple signatures for different regions. The new satellite would communicate only with the nodes that have the correct signature and ignore all other nodes that can’t provide the region signature. Downside is that we would need some kind of KYC for storage node operators that want to join this satellite.
  2. With future implementation we could make it so that the customer can use any satellite and specifiy the region he wants to upload to. The satellite should select storage nodes in that region. We would also have to modify repair and graceful exit to make sure they also select new nodes in that region.
1 Like

Is there an ETA for that? This could be very helpful to get new customers. As additional implementation I would suggest that the customer can simply select the law he wants to comply to, e.g GDPR and the satellite knows which regions this includes and which not.

1 Like

Potential customers should please contact our marketing team and we will work that out.

If it is possible to store data compliant on Storj DCS then this information should be on the frontpage.
I’d even wonder if such a choice would justify a price surcharge.
In any way I could imagine that the Storj DCS offer could become more popular for EU customers if the can rest assured that their data do not leave the GDPR region.

1 Like

It obviously depends on the equipment used. Something like an optical repeater wouldn’t show in traceroute.

Thankfully, we are not in Omsk any more. Based in Ekaterinburg now. I’m no longer using even half the medication I was on in Omsk.

Not only this. I can think of an example even for my current employer. We have a lawyer as a client and they were migrating a large archive of data from an old web app they are legally obliged to keep for multiple years. As we were dealing with Immigration data we needed to do the migration in such a way that the data never left Australia for any reason. There is no law as such about it but it is common sense to do it that way in terms of risk exposure.

I understand all the benefits. Please reach out to our marketing team if you have a specific usecase in mind. Together we can work something out.