Vladimir’s answer on this burning question, during the recent AMA left me speechless. He shrugged his shoulders and attempted to gaslight the audience “yeah we good on privacy no reason to be in eu, trust, skibidi”.
It is entirely possible that he is uninformed, or living in a SF bubble, but the issue of moving clouds into EU is all that is talked about in the EU countries. To paint a picture, I work at a digital agency dealing with enterprises, and virtually every single client has asked this question i the past couple of years (since the Pribacy Shield was invalidated in 2020) in the past year months (since DPF was challenged) and especially during the last 6 months (since US started openly targeting EU privacy laws). We now have a whole program about air-gapping our enterprise clients from US, and moving other clients to EU cloud providers. All new projects are projected to be outside of the big cloud companies unless specifically requested by the client. Even the various EU governments are discussing removal of Microsoft from public use, and in the Nordics there is already a similar push by both the public, provate sector and the trade unions, for removal of US companies from helthcare and payment processing. Heck, supermarket shelfs have little warning symbols next to US goods, what are we talking about? The level of awareness is real.
In other words, this is about much more than just Kagi’s stance on privacy. Vlad could have easily answered with “yes we are in the US, but we are committed to honouring EU laws by having prepared DPAs, and we have standard EU-approved contractual clauses for bith b2b and b2c users, as well as SOC2 which while not EU specific showcases that our architecture is incapable of storing user information of our EU customers inside US.”, however, he didn’t say that - which in my mind shows that he has no clue about the importance of these.
Uuf, I was so happy with Kagi thus far, and I wouldn’t even worry about these, I’d just trust Vlad… But the cluelessly defensive stance on that AMA really shook my trust in the company. A CEO that isn’t looking to sell to SF VC capital asap would not say those things, a CEO that isn’t cucked by partnerships with some of the indexes would not defend this (reminiscent of the Yandex situation), a CEO that talks to any of their EU customers would have easy and clear answers for this question that is literally mentioned in daily news every day - as opposed to being surprised by it. So this means either he doesn't know, or he doesn't care, both are discouraging. Please be better 🙁
