Servers in Europe: what it means for your photos

The photos and videos of your family sit on servers somewhere these days. Most of the time you don't think about that, until you wonder who can actually reach them. "We host in Europe" is a familiar reassurance then, but that phrase says less than it seems. It's not only about where the disks sit, but also about 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.

Which law your photos fall under

In Europe, the GDPR protects your data and defines who may access it and under what conditions. Where the disks sit is not the whole story there: a European data centre owned by an American company also falls under American law (the CLOUD Act), which makes it possible to demand data even while it physically sits in Europe. At Ohhi, the servers and the company both sit within the European legal order.

Your photos sit on servers within the European Union, with a Dutch company, and only European law applies to them.

That's why we build on infrastructure that sits entirely within the European legal order, so that any request for access always runs through a European court, with the safeguards that come with it.

In practice, that gives you the following:

• One legal order. Only European law applies to your photos, including the GDPR.
• No trade in your data. We show no ads and don't sell your data; you pay for the service.
• Access is an exception. We don't browse your library, and any lawful request has to follow the 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. For a broader overview, the page on the European alternative to Facebook and Instagram lays the differences side by side. If you want to see it for yourself, create an account and your first photos will be safe in Europe within minutes.