We have an application which is using Firebase realtime database.
A potential new client asked us about the data location. In the UK the laws say this: “not transferred outside the European Economic Area without adequate protection” (https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/principle-8-international/)
But what is that means?
Here is the actual google privacy shield: https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI
Can I store customer data like email address and post address in Firebase realtime database as a UK company?
1.5: Data Storage. Unless otherwise provided for by the Paid Services, Customer Data will be stored in the United States ("Hosting Data Location"), except that the Hosting Data Location may not apply to Customer Data copied by Customer or a Customer's End User to another location or used with other Google products and services.
Please read their terms of service
Other Google cloud platform may have different location, e.g.:
1.4 Data Location. Customer may select where certain Customer Data will be stored (“Data Location Selection”), and Google will store it there in accordance with the Service Specific Terms. If a Data Location Selection is not covered by the Service Specific Terms (or a Data Location Selection is not made by Customer with respect to any Customer Data), Google may process and store the Customer Data anywhere Google or its agents maintain facilities. By using the Services, Customer consents to this processing and storage of Customer Data. Under this Agreement, Google is merely a data processor.
(Refer to their terms of service as well)
Related
when I create a project in firebase, I am offered to choose analytics location
When you click on the question mark, they write: "This represents the country/region of your organization. This does not affect where Google may process and store Customer Data for Firebase."
Question: If I want to upload an application to the appstore for different countries, for example, America, Russia and European countries, then I will have to connect several firebase projects for different countries at once? How can I connect one firebase for all countries?
Not sure but it seems you are mixing up things.
When setting up services on your Google Cloud Project, you may choose their location, this means that the service you are activating will be hosted on a specific place, and thus people from other countries may have bigger latency accessing your services. Example, if you host a service in North America, the latency for users from Asia will be higher.
That will not geographically restrict or limit users to access your service, web app, or API services.
If you want to restrict users from specific countries from downloading your app, on the app store you have settings that will do that for you.
The short answer: no, you don't need multiple projects for multiple countries.
I know scalability is not an issue in Firebase and supports up to 100k Simultaneous connections(in general).
Based on pricing documentation:
You can create multiple database instances to go beyond the 100K
concurrent limit. See Pricing FAQ for more information.
Question 1: What if there is more than 200k users using simultaneously on the same database? The other half of the users could not query, connect or the request will be placed in queue?
(As a Firebase plan subscriber, I would like to know how Firebase deals with the problem to ensure the quality of the services provided to our customers are always in top-notch)
Since, App globalisation is common nowadays and many companies' practices are to have servers across multiple regions to provide better and stable performance. Online game for example which required low latency.
As for now, the firebase user is required to set the default location when creating the project which is non-editable afterward. Some issues even rises where the users realised they deployed their app to the wrong regions and do not have clues on how to change the regions.
This represents the country/region of your organisation/company. Your
selection also sets the appropriate currency for your revenue
reporting. The selected country does not determine the location of
your data for Firebase features. Google may process and store Customer
Data anywhere Google or its agents maintain facilities.
Question 2: Will or does Firebase provide a solution / tailor-made to such practice which having our database in multiple regions while having a headquartered region and multiple other regions sharing all the databases, functions and auth across the regions?
(For now to have multiple servers location, we have to create different projects and the user and data syncing will be a problem)
Hope the language does not offend, cheers!
It seems like your question (or at least your assumptions) is based on the Firebase Realtime Database, so I'll answer for that below.
Q1) You can create more than 2 databases in a single project, each of which allows 100K connections. So it can scale beyond 200K connections. All of these are hosted in the same region though, so you can't use each database for a separate region.
Q2) For a database solution that handles multiple regions, I'd recommend looking at Cloud Firestore. Also see: Cloud Firestore - selecting region to store data?
I'm working on a product which for legal reasons needs to store user data in a specific region.
I'm using Firebase so I created a project selecting the region it needs to be in however looking at firestore where the user data is kept I can't find anything pinpointing the region the data actually is. The thing which makes me worry the most is the Cloud Functions endpoints start with us-central1 but obviously that could just be that cloud functions don't exist in the specified region.
Given this is an important matter is there a way to confirm the location of data and even force it to be in a specific region?
Update
Cloud Firestore supports the following regional GCP resource locations, in addition to the 2 multi-region (nam5, eur3) locations:
See the documentation for an up-to-date list of locations.
Original Answer
Cloud Firestore is currently only available in our US multi-region (Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina). As we approach GA we plan to roll it out to multiple locations across the globe and you'll be able to select which one at creation time. Not something you can do today though.
I am selling stuff online and I would like to geocode my customer delivery addresses before delivery to make the delivery address is correct to avoid wrong delivery. If I use Google Map API, after I query an address, can I save the returned attribute in the own storage (such as building and street names, lat/lon) so that I don't need to re-query every time? Some customers addresses are repeating or written in incorrect format. If I can search it from my own archieve before Google Map API query, it can save the amount of time/queries required?
The Terms of service allow a temporary caching up to 30 days with a purpose of improving the performance of your application. The permanent storage is prohibited.
For further details refer to section 10.5 of Terms of service:
No caching or storage. You will not pre-fetch, cache, index, or store any Content to be used outside the Service, except that you may store limited amounts of Content solely for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation due to network latency (and not for the purpose of preventing Google from accurately tracking usage), and only if such storage:
is temporary (and in no event more than 30 calendar days);
is secure;
does not manipulate or aggregate any part of the Content or Service; and
does not modify attribution in any way.
We are defining our privacy policy and customers (specially in the EU) are concerned where their data is located.
Is this still the right answer or did anything change since 2014?
http://grokbase.com/t/gg/firebase-talk/14axy4z42p/firebase-where-is-my-data-stored
At the Google DevFest in Amsterdam, I heard from Frank van Puffelen who presented Firebase to us that at that time (10/10/2015) they had a datacentre in the US and were planning to open one in Europe.
I'd like to give you more details but that's all I know.
I'm also hoping they will open a datacentre in the EU, since there are fresh laws about where our data collected from EU citizens can be stored and that the Safe Harbour legislation will become irrelevant from what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong).
According to the official FAQ, there are certain services that are US-Only.
For example, these are US-Only:
Firebase Realtime Database
Cloud Firestore for Firebase
The rest of the services are claimed Global, and can be hosted in any Google data center, or even a data center run by a selected external party. E.g.:
Cloud Storage for Firebase
Cloud Functions for Firebase
The FAQ also mentions, that Firestore will soon become available Globally:
Note: Though currently US-only, Cloud Firestore will soon be available at all Google Cloud Platform locations.
According to the Google guide Set a project location, you can either choose for a multi-regional location or a regional location. Multi-regional locations offer better replication over multiple regions and better write latency, but are only available in the US (as of writing). Regional locations keep your data within the region, but that means that if that region experiences e.g. a power outage, your service will become unavailable. However, for regional locations, a data center in Frankfurt, Germany is available (again, as of writing).
Side-Note: Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage will be within the specified region, but Cloud Functions will always be in us-central1 (as of writing).