Recent news regarding United States governmental agencies collecting and monitoring data across the Internet were pretty well known for years among the tech community. The details and the specific activities, such as the PRISM project might not have been matters of common knowledge though. It remains nonetheless true that any organisation or individual who is connected to the Internet -which means a lot of of them on the Earth- needs to be able to keep both its privacy and the ownership of its data. It is not just a matter of national interest and sovereignty for countries. It is not just a political matter that might be solved between the United States and Europe for instance. The right to privacy and data ownership is a fundamental right, on the Internet and elsewhere.
They are also giving advice to avoid being spied upon and to remain in control of your data:
Source and pick commodity hardware that is manufactured outside of the U.S., possibly by vendord who are not based there. You can acquire an entire infrastructure from these vendors starting with servers to desktops, laptops, tablets and even smartphones.
For your hosting or your bandwidth choose a provider that is located in France, Europe or any country that does not snoop and collect your data as it passes on the network.
This is good advice - and clearly; Mandriva sees this as a business oportunity , so naturally you should buy Mandriva servers to stay safe.
But maybe the business and the patriotism is getting a bit in the way. France is monitoring the data of every internet user and had the HADOPI- three strikes and you are cut off the internet - law for illegal download of copyrighted material.
This law was revoked two days ago after hardly having been enforced. That might have been another positive effect of Snowdens whistle blowing.
Instead of the cutoff; the sinners are now being fined.
And in order to do that you need to monitor and retain meta data. So the advice should have been to pick a German provider if you do not want snooping on your network.
Because Germany does not retain your data - as France does.
There is only one country that can compete with the US patriotism and that is France - and as we have seen this can have bad side effects on your privacy.
Mandriva SA has a good approach to this though - and privacy is a rare commodity these days so they should be successful with this.
