Privacy Insights That Matter

Data Residency Requirements: EU vs US Explained

Your SaaS platform serves users in Germany, France, and California. Your infrastructure runs on AWS us-east-1. Your analytics vendor is headquartered in San Francisco. Your customer support tool uses a helpdesk provider with data centers in Virginia. Each of these arrangements involves the transfer or storage of personal data in ways that intersect with two fundamentally different regulatory philosophies — and the cost of misunderstanding those differences is climbing. Meta's €1.2 billion fine for unlawful EU-US data transfers remains the largest single GDPR penalty on record. TikTok absorbed €530 million in 2025 for failing to protect EEA user data from unauthorized access in China. Cumulative GDPR fines have now passed €7.1 billion.