How would you know?

Putting a European flag on a landing page takes about ten seconds. Pick a template and drop in the twelve stars. Checking whether the flag is true takes a company register lookup and a read through a regulator’s database, sometimes a court record on top. The claim costs nothing and the check costs an afternoon, so the web fills up with claims. That asymmetry is why this site exists.

FindInEurope is a directory of digital services with sourced, dated evidence about what is actually European in each one: who owns the company, which law can compel it, whose hardware it runs on. This piece explains why we built it around evidence rather than around the slogan, because the slogan has a problem.

The slogan splits in two

Say “buy European” out loud and two audiences hear two different things. One hears protectionism and stops listening; that reading treats the idea as economics done badly. The other hears a flag to rally behind and starts cheering, which is worse, because cheering needs no facts. Both readings treat the question as one of loyalty.

Loyalty is the wrong axis. A directory built on it would be a list of vibes. The question that actually helps someone choosing an email provider or a bank is quieter: whatever this company claims about itself, how would you know?

The double illusion

Ask that question systematically and the market turns out to be lying in both directions at once.

In one direction: services that look impeccably European. The .eu domain, the GDPR badge in the footer. Follow the ownership chain in the register and it ends at a parent company incorporated somewhere else entirely, which means the reassuring flag sits on top of a company that answers, when it matters, to foreign law.

In the other direction: services that are exactly what a “buy European” reader is looking for, a family-owned host running its own datacenters or an email provider controlled by a foundation, and that are nearly invisible. They spend money on hardware instead of marketing, so a search for “European alternative to X” buries them under affiliate listicles written by people who never opened a register.

Both failures are failures of sight. The information exists; it sits in commercial registers, regulator databases and filings that nobody reads on a Tuesday evening while trying to leave Gmail.

Where the flag stops mattering

Jurisdiction sounds abstract until an order lands. Where a company’s servers sit and which law can compel the company are two separate questions, and marketing collapses them into one on purpose. An order is served on a legal entity, wherever that entity is incorporated, and the datacenter address changes nothing about who must comply.

We hold our own listings to that standard too. Proton Mail scores well in this directory, and its profile still documents the 2021 case in which French police, routing a request through Europol to the Swiss authorities, obtained a binding Swiss order that made Proton log a user’s IP address. Swiss jurisdiction changed who could compel Proton and under what procedure. It did not mean nobody could. A directory that hid that case to keep a high scorer looking clean would be running the same trick as the flag-draped landing page.

Two axes, on purpose

That is why every rated service here carries two scores rather than one. Jurisdiction asks which law the company ultimately answers to, traced through its ownership chain. Independence asks who controls it and whose infrastructure it depends on. A flag compresses both into a single pixel; we keep them apart because they can disagree, and the disagreement is usually the most useful thing on the page. A Swiss company outside EU jurisdiction, running its own hardware, and a German brand running on a US cloud are different risks, and a reader deserves to see which one they are buying.

Every input is labelled by how we know it. A register entry or a regulator record counts as verified. A company’s own privacy policy counts as claimed. What we could not establish is marked unknown, and it costs points instead of being quietly rounded up. Plenty of what companies say about themselves cannot be checked against any primary source; where that is the case, the dossier says so inline instead of dressing the claim up as proof.

You can break the score

The algorithm and its weights are published in full, and the same evidence always produces the same number. There is no editorial dial. If you think a score is wrong, the methodology page gives you everything needed to recompute it, and the corrections policy commits us to fixing evidence we got wrong, with the correction noted on the page. A scoring system you cannot challenge is an opinion with decimals.

Money is handled the same way. Nothing here can be bought: no paid listings, scores or rankings. If an outbound link ever earns us a commission, it will say so next to that link, and the score will have been computed by the same public algorithm before any of that is considered. Roughly half of the catalogue runs no affiliate programme at all and is listed with full prominence anyway, which is the cheapest proof we can offer that the editorial side does not know what the funding side is doing.

Who watches the witness

A directory like this has an obvious failure mode: it works, becomes worth acquiring, and gets acquired. The flag stays on the site while the ownership changes underneath, which is precisely the pattern we exist to expose.

The defence is structural. FindInEurope is being placed under Fundamenta Europa, an independent nonprofit foundation now in registration. A foundation has no shares to sell, so there is no quiet way to buy it. Until that registration completes, the site is operated by Seethru Research sp. z o.o., a Polish company, and the About page carries our own dossier in the same format we use for everyone else: legal form, register number, seat. We score others on register evidence; refusing to show our own would end the argument before it started.

The habit

We do not expect anyone to memorise a methodology. If this site works, what a reader takes away is a reflex: when a service says it is European or independent, ask how you would know, and expect a source rather than a flag.

Start with us. The registers we cite are public, the algorithm is published, and the corrections address is at the bottom of every page.