Servers in Europe: what it really means for your data
A photo is data, and that data sits somewhere. We explain where it sits and why that address matters legally.
Illustrative image · a data centre inside the European legal order
"We host in Europe" is a familiar reassurance. Yet that phrase says less than it seems. A European data centre owned by an American company still falls under American law. So the question isn't only where the disks sit, but which legal order your photos fall under.
Where your photos physically live
At Ohhi your images sit on servers inside the European Union, run under Dutch law. We don't replicate to regions outside the EU, and we don't route your images through a US cache for a faster preview. The data never leaves the European legal order. That's a design choice, not a setting we could flip by accident.
That choice has a concrete outcome. It decides which government, with which piece of paper, can demand access to what you uploaded.
GDPR versus the CLOUD Act
In Europe, the GDPR protects your data and strictly defines who may access it and under what conditions. In the United States, the CLOUD Act gives American authorities the power to demand data from American companies, even when that data physically sits in Europe. A European address therefore offers no protection if the company behind it falls under US jurisdiction.
Whether your photos are protected depends on which jurisdiction the company falls under, not on the physical location of the disk.
That's why 'no Big Tech in between' is, for us, not a slogan but a legal precondition. We build on infrastructure that sits entirely within the European legal order, so that only a European court can compel access, with the safeguards that come with it.
In practice, that gives you the following:
- One legal order. Only European law applies to your photos. No foreign authority can request them through a back door.
- No quiet resale. There's no ad network or data broker sitting between you and your files, looking on.
- Access is an exception. We don't browse your library, and any lawful request has to follow the strict European framework.
Where your photos live is bound up with what happens to them. That's why we also promise that we never use your images to train AI: the same choice, seen from another angle. It's also the reason your timeline here has no algorithm and no followers. If you want to see it for yourself, create an account and your first photos will be safe in Europe within minutes.
