Zettabox was a pan-European online cloud storage and team-sharing tool, created by co-founders James Kinsella and Robert McNeal. The company's operational headquarters was located in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

, whilst the Sales and Marketing decisions are headed up in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

. At the time when Zettabox was founded, the total amount of worldwide data saved on networks had surpassed 1,000

Exabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

and entered a new era of sizing storage –

Zettabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

(1 x 1021). The company seems to be out of business.

EU Data Law Regulation

With the cloud team sharing and storage market heavily dominated by American-domiciled companies, such as

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...

and

Box.com } Box, Inc. (formerly Box.net) is a public company based in Redwood City, California. It develops and markets cloud-based content management, collaboration, and file sharing tools for businesses. Box was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan S ...

, Zettabox was launched as the European alternative. The launch coincided with the news of the impending

General Data Protection Regulation The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in partic ...

(part of the

Digital Single Market On 6 May 2015, the European Commission, led at the time by Jean-Claude Juncker, communicated the Digital Single Market strategy which intends to remove virtual borders, boost digital connectivity, and make it easier for consumers to access cross ...

strategy) which requires all companies doing business in Europe, to know where their data is stored and be able to communicate this information to their customers. More recently, in 2018 and 2019, a series of privacy violations at Facebook and other social media companies has renewed calls for greater scrutiny of how the largest companies use and misuse users' data. Zettabox has been described as being ‘an example of a genuinely European cloud storage solution’ in “The EU Data Protection Reform and Big Data Factsheet”.http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/data-protection-big-data_factsheet_web_en.pdf The European Commission cited Zettabox as the first major pan-European alternative to the US-based cloud storage products like Google Drive and Dropbox.

References

Cloud storage Cloud computing providers {{network-software-stub