According to a recent article on Reuters, Google has a plan in play to move British Google users away from EU regulations, which provide one of the world’s most comprehensive data protection structures through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The change would be another result of BREXIT, the UK’s exit from the EU, which occurred last month and could potentially leave millions of users without the benefit of GDPR.

The switch would be accomplished by moving the UK from Irish jurisdiction, which provides for the EU-backed protection, to another jurisdiction, perhaps to that of the United States, which has some of the weakest privacy protection in the entire world. It would be formalised by a new Terms of Service agreement that would be floated out soon and required to be approved for continued use of most Google services.

There is more to this story than meets the eye, because when talking about privacy, we are also talking about law enforcement. The EU law severely restricts the ability of law enforcement agencies to collect private information about users, but this change would make it easier for those agencies to collect such information. Without delving into political consequences, we will leave it to the reader to decide if this is a benefit or a detriment.