Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

by Mossy9 • 9 months ago

299 129 9 months ago

forbes.com

giuliomagnifico• 9 months ago

It’s an old new (July 22)

throwawayffffas3• 9 months ago

Carniaux did say that the situation had never arisen.

That's what he would say if the company was under a gag order in the US. So I would take anything they say with a mountain of salt.

alwayseasy• 9 months ago

Specifically here, he is under oath in France so an American gag order wouldn't protect him from the French justice system.

This make it less likely he's lying. It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law. Then the boss can swear to the Senate that they're complying.

This is exactly the system the US Congress accused TikTok of having set up.

hyghjiyhu2• 9 months ago

If the data center is operated by a "trusted subsidiary" as the article mentions and everyone in key roles is a French citizen with no connection to the US then there is no one to give a gag order.

In practice the US HQ could mandate a security update that secretly uploads all data to the US but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't think anyone is ready to open.

dathinab3• 9 months ago

Until this happened MS was still going around trying to convince lawyers to use their Cloud and telling them that there is no issue.

Including certain contractual "standard"(1) agreements which would make some of their higher management _personally_ liable for undue data access even under Cloud act from the US!!!

(1) As in standard agreements for providers which store lawyer data, including highly sensitive details about ongoing cases etc.

So you can't really trust MS anymore at all, even if personal liability (e.g. lying under oath) is at stack. And the max ceiling for the penalties for lying under oath seem less then what you can run into in the previous mentioned case...

You also have to look a bit closer at what it even means if "the french MS CEO swears they are complying" it means he doesn't know about non compliance and did tell his employees to comply and hired someone to verify it etc.

But the US doesn't need the French CEO to know, they just need to gain access to the French/EU server through US employees, which given that most of the infra software is written in the US and international admin teams for 24/7 support is really not that hard...

And even if you want to sue the French CEO after a breach/he (hypothetically) lied he would just say he didn't because he also was lied too leading to an endless goose chase and "upsi" by now the French CEO somehow is living in the US.

And that is if you ever learn about it happening, but thanks to the US having pretty bad gag orders/secret court stuff the chance for that is very low.

So from my POV it looks like MS has knowingly and systematically lying and deceiving customer, including such with highly sensitive data, and EU governments about how "safe" the data is even if it lead to personal legal liabilities of management.

And I mind to remember that AWS was giving similar guarantees they most most likely can't hold, but I'm not fully sure. Idk. about Google.

Oh and if you hope that the whole Sovereign Cloud things will help, it wont. It's a huge mage pretend theater moving millions over millions into the hands of US cloud providers while not providing a realistic solutions to the problem it is supposed to solve and neglecting local competition which actually could make a difference, smh.

MengerSponge2• 9 months ago

This is exactly the system the US Congress accused TikTok of having set up.

"Every accusation is a confession" remains undefeated

jacquesm2• 9 months ago

Less likely doesn't say much though. He may have simply weighed the chances of the French government ever finding out that he lied.

It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law.

I would think that is not just a possibility, but a certainty.

throwawayffffas3• 9 months ago

This make it less likely he's lying. It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law. Then the boss can swear to the Senate that they're complying.

It's also possible that US employees had access to French servers without anyone in France knowing.

shevy-java• 9 months ago

Time to pull away all EU data from the Trump USA.

embedding-shape• 9 months ago

I think many already started, the only reason it's starting to appear in the news is because people are making progress with the moves, and US companies are noticing it, but it's been planned and organized for a lot longer than just the last year.

mk893• 9 months ago

I think starting from the day after CLOUD act was approved (2018).

Crazy to even think that such a law exists.

spookie• 9 months ago

Can assure you it has been happening for a while.

varispeed• 9 months ago

Governments are not exempt from Cloud Act and US providers can be under gag order, so from EU or UK government perspective, they will never know if data has been accessed by 3rd country and what happened to it.

This is actually amazing that all the tenders have not been rejected under national security grounds or simply security services (yet again) have not done the job tax payers pay them to do.

immibis2• 9 months ago

they will never know if data has been accessed by 3rd country and what happened to it.

They should have arranged to get a 100 euro refund every time it happens, or 440 euros if the UK does it.

11235813213• 9 months ago

I wouldn't think "sovereign" EU data would be protected from US snooping either, unless the Five Eyes Plus alliance is going to be dissolved. Even then...

GTP• 9 months ago

Well, not relying on US cloud would already be a giant step in the right direction, by making it significantly harder to snoop on the data.

11235813213• 9 months ago

I don't believe that's the case because the intelligence pooling is meant to remove cross-border friction. A general breakdown of western alliances would probably be required (and maybe that's where we're headed.)

blibble2• 9 months ago

I suspect the other 4 eyes are somewhat less willing to do the US regime's bidding these days

emodendroket3• 9 months ago

On what basis?

IsTom• 9 months ago

With UK out there's no Five Eyes members in EU.

11235813213• 9 months ago

"Plus" is key - Five Eyes Plus includes EU members France and Germany, at minimum. It's a comfortable informal relationship between Five Eyes and highly trusted nations that have almost joined Five Eyes in the past. France was closest to becoming the official sixth eye under Obama. Japan is another of these nations.

jmyeet3• 9 months ago

An inevitable consequence of this administration destroying US foreign influence and power at an unprecedented rate is that (IMHO) it is inevitable that the EU builds their own cloud and mandates its use for EU data. It is becoming a matter of national security.

The interesting thing is that the US is acting in the exact way that they accuse China of acting. Companies like Huawei are forbidden from installing telecom infrastructure for "national security" reasons [1]. One of justifications for first banning then forcing a sale of Tiktok was because of possible Chinese government interference. It's only a matter of time before the EU and China start making the same determination against US tech giants (eg Meta executive brags about silencing dissent [2]).

This administration really is killing the golden goose.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-e...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eO8byuv6PE

spongebobstoes2• 9 months ago

I don't think that YouTube video is a good supporting piece for your point. The spokesperson says they don't want to propagate harmful stereotypes. "brag about silencing dissent" seems like a strawman interpretation

A better faith interpretation is that people are free to criticize Israel and Zionism on Meta, just not using racist tropes.

jmyeet3• 9 months ago

Oh if that were only true. It's been made apparent in the last 2 years in particular that fighting antisemitism from the perspective of the ADL and figures like Jordana Cutler (who previously worked for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office) simply means silencing critcism of Israel, even when that means siding with actual antisemites (up to and including neo_nazis and outright Nazis). Examples:

- Ben Shapiro excuses antisemitic remarks by Ann Coulter because she's pro-Israel [1];

- ADL defends Elon Musk for making the Nazi salute (twice) on stage [2]

- We brutalized people with the police for organizing peaceful protests to say "maybe we shouldn't bomb children" or to get their respective universities to divest their endowments from the state doing the bombing;

- We went so far as trying to deport legal permanent residents for organizing said peaceful protests (ie Mahmoud Khalil); and

- The IHRA definition of antisemitism includes criticisms of the state of Israel.

[1] https://x.com/benshapiro/status/644505141299671041

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/22/adl-faces-backlash-...

Yeul2• 9 months ago

Some of us remember Americans going ape shit over that Kirk guy lmao.

TiredOfLife• 9 months ago

Huawei is itself fully to blame. They knowingly supplied equipment to Iran.

zrn900• 9 months ago

Yeaah! God forbid anyone trades with those whom the US targets. But the US sending 70% of the bombs Israel used to murder children is okay though...

schuyler2d• 9 months ago

I can't imagine the Cloud Act being effective without Microsoft (and French gov) complicity.

If they can make successful tax shelters they can architect the entities and the architecture to remove this option.

There's some 9-eyes thing where this is a feature not a bug

kmeisthax• 9 months ago

Microsoft tried architecting a "surveillance shelter" in Ireland. It worked. That's actually why the CLOUD Act even exists[0]: it was passed specifically to prohibit Microsoft from doing this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat...

pkstn• 9 months ago

Luckily we have great European cloud companies like UpCloud https://upcloud.com

jeffrallen2• 9 months ago

With 3 data centers in the USA, seems like they are probably subject to the CLOUD act.

josephh2• 9 months ago

But then who can? No global cloud providers, including Hetzner and OVH, are free from CLOUD act because they have US presence[1].

1. https://us.ovhcloud.com/legal/faqs/cloud-act/

dboreham2• 9 months ago

I'm guessing: Russia?

immibis2• 9 months ago

Possibly only their US subsidiaries though?

Sayrus• 9 months ago

OVHCloud US is a different company from the rest of the world.

https://blog.ovhcloud.com/cloud-data-act/

josephh2• 9 months ago

You can't just spin up an LLC and call it a separate company. OVHCloud is still OVHCloud US' subsidiary company.

From the FAQ page I linked:

In accordance with our Privacy Policy, OVHcloud will comply with lawful requests from public authorities. Under the CLOUD Act, that could include data stored outside of the United States. OVHcloud will consider the availability of legal mechanisms to quash or modify requests as permitted by the CLOUD Act.

formerly_proven• 9 months ago

The separation is even in the URLs, all the locales are using paths, except the US, which lives under us.ovhcloud.com. All locales use a customer console hosted at ovh.com, except the US, which has it under us.ovhcloud.com.

blackoil• 9 months ago

https://www.alibabacloud.com/en?_p_lc=1

timeon2• 9 months ago

Who? You can use Hetzner and OVH proper instead of US subsidiaries. Using AWS/Azure/GC in Europe these days is pretty risky for more than one reason.

AlanYx• 9 months ago

FISA and the Stored Communications Act as modified by the CLOUD Act don't distinguish between (i) parent company overseas + US subsidiary and (ii) parent company in US + foreign subsidiary. In both instances the US asserts personal jurisdiction, extending to wherever the data is stored geographically.

segfaultex2• 9 months ago

I think we'll see a lot of companies moving away from public cloud providers in the future, but I don't think it'll be because of any privacy-related concerns.

It rarely makes economic sense to deploy workloads onto the public cloud unless you have critical uptime requirements or need massive elasticity.

jeffrallen2• 9 months ago

Exoscale is a European cloud provider with no exposure to the CLOUD Act.

(I work there.)

blibble2• 9 months ago

after this whopping great vulnerability in Azure, anything there prior to that being fixed should be considered public anyway:

https://dirkjanm.io/obtaining-global-admin-in-every-entra-id...

conception• 9 months ago

Don't forget when Azure had it's root cert compromised. Which... maybe is still a thing?

emodendroket3• 9 months ago

A bit of a "hoist by their own petard" situation since the US has been raising this specter about Chinese tech for quite some time.

jacquesm2• 9 months ago

Yes. For Europe there isn't a real alternative other than to painstakingly re-grow our independence. That will take a long time.

eeasss• 9 months ago

This is known. The problem is that the EU is hooked on us technology. I don’t see this untangling soon which is a big strategic weakness

BiteCode_dev2• 9 months ago

Pretty much yes. From Saas to authentication systems to OS to chips. The EU infra is entirely dependent on the US. All documents, emails, chat messages, and most forms of storage are directly or indirectly linked to an American service.

On top of that, the US can update it all remotely, including the hardware now thanks to things like intel ME.

Let's hope we never get into a conflict with them, because even without bombs, they can basically shut us down with a few keystrokes: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/the-eu-can-be-shut-down-with-a-fe...

Or at least have everything they need to develop such a capability. And it's not like the current people in power care much about alienating other countries.

autoexec5• 9 months ago

From Saas to authentication systems to OS to chips. The EU infra is entirely dependent on the US.

I would absolutely love to see the EU invest in developing processors and operating systems. It'd benefit us all to have real competition in those spaces, and it's the only way the EU can ever keep their data out of the hands of the US government.

cesarb3• 9 months ago

the US can update it all remotely, including the hardware now thanks to things like intel ME

Let's not be excessively alarmist; AFAIK, the Intel ME is not (unless you're using things like vPro) exposed directly to the network, you need the cooperation of the operating system to reach the ME.

Of course, said operating system is usually Microsoft Windows, which can be updated remotely... (and even Linux users often use USA-based distributions).

tempodox• 9 months ago

Of course they can’t. U.S. companies are under U.S. jurisdiction, no matter where their data centers are located.

bluGill• 9 months ago

This is a French company owned by a US company though which makes things complex.

radiator• 9 months ago

What difference, at this point, does it make? The EU has already surrendered any notion of sovereignty to the US in the fields of military and energy.

Havoc2• 9 months ago

The whole concept of big cloud somehow setting up sovereign clouds in Europe seems incredibly naive to me.

Every AWS employee knows where his bread is buttered - Seattle not Brussels

rdtsc• 9 months ago

Yup. I always thought it was a way just to get business in EU. Do some performative dance of "hey, look! a separate DC building with EU employees only" and then hope nobody would ask too many questions.

Then the next level is regulators in EU also have to care and can't just say "ok, you have a separate DC building with EU employees only. Good. My job is done, I checked" and move on.

mk893• 9 months ago

Apparently someone buys it, otherwise AWS would not invest 8+ billions in Germany: https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws-plans-to-invest-7-8-...

"If it's certified, it must be good".

Havoc2• 9 months ago

They buy it because it's enough to tick the corporate compliance box. Decisions made by people that don't actually give a F

Yeul2• 9 months ago

Yep when the CIA calls every American salutes and follows orders.

pqtyw• 9 months ago

Well no, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and Tim Apple will come grovelling when they are called... that's all it takes.

If you do something that the EU doesn't like it's response will be relatively rational and proportional. While the US government is currently run by unpredictable and volatile people. So risk/reward wise it's rather obvious whose orders they will be following.

csense• 9 months ago

This applies to any company, doesn't it?

Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply.

"I will never give up customer data" is a very tough promise to keep, if the government threatens you with your business license being revoked, your servers and domains being forcibly seized by the police, and you personally going to jail.

(Under the current US administration, we can add "A close examination of the immigration status of all foreign nationals employed by your company, followed by probable deportation or jail" to the list of potential consequences for resisting the government.)

satellite2• 9 months ago

Of course. But what if the holding lives in a country that don't enforce this (or is too weak to). Then all the subsidiaries are really sovereign from the host country perspective.

It seems the solution is ages old. Don't have the holding incorporated in an empire...

vladvasiliu• 9 months ago

How would this work in practice? If the empire wants to get at your data, why do you think it would shy away from pressuring a country so weak that it can't afford to enforce this on their companies?

stetrain• 9 months ago

Then the empire just says that they want the data or you won't be allowed to operate in the empire, which would be bad for profits and anger shareholders.

autoexec5• 9 months ago

The trick is to collect as little data as possible and to get rid of what you need to collect as quickly as you can. This is in direct opposition to the practices of companies like Microsoft which wants to spy on their users and profit from the data they collect though.

There's also an open question of how possible it is to run a system that doesn't collect/store data in a way that makes it possible to be collected by the government. The US government can force companies to compromise their systems or shut down their services if they refuse. In the past they've even threatened that shutting down a service instead of compromising it could still get operators in legal trouble.

At this point anyone who wants to keep the US government out of their data should avoid using any US company.

ebb_earl_co• 9 months ago

This is why I still prefer Signal; this practice seems to be their modus operandi even though they, too, were affected by AWS us-east-1 catastrophe

xorcist• 9 months ago

That's not so. In a democratic state of law, the police can not unilaterally decide to seize you servers, and the politicians cannot tell the police to do so. Separation of powers is a thing.

recursive2• 9 months ago

What would stop them from doing that?

pjmlp• 9 months ago

Nice theory, that even on US isn't really working nowadays.

charles_f• 9 months ago

Well this is especially significant because Microsoft is currently building a sovereign datacenter in France (nicknamed "Bleu"). I'm wondering what the consequence of that testimony will be.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...

throwawayffffas3• 9 months ago

Well yes but that is all the more reason for EU entities to use EU companies for data storage.

cesarb3• 9 months ago

This applies to any company, doesn't it? Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply.

Not all countries have an equivalent to the USA CLOUD Act.

tharne2• 9 months ago

Not all countries have an equivalent to the USA CLOUD Act.

Not yet, anyway. Unfortunately, pretty much every country seems to be getting less and less open and free over time. Some are better than others, but it does feel like everyone is regrettably rowing in same direction.

LarsKrimi2• 9 months ago

"I will never give up customer data" is a very tough promise to keep

If you don't have a spine, sure

That's what US companies are seen as from a European perspective: Spineless and untrustable

It's a great sales argument for locally grown software though, so I'm not complaining :)

tharne2• 9 months ago

If you don't have a spine, sure

I've never understood this take. A lot of people were saying this sort of thing when Proton Mail turned over some user data to authorities in Europe a while back.

If you're running a tech company and run afoul of the law in some or another jurisdiction, it doesn't matter how much spine you think you have. When a group of men with guns, i.e. the police, shows up at your door and gives you the option of turning over some customer data or spending the next 10 years of your life in a steel cage, I'm betting that practically no one is going to choose the cage, spine or not.

The only way to keep user data safe is to not collect it in the first place.

tremon• 9 months ago

Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply

Not according to both Amazon's and Microsoft's historic marketing materials. They have always claimed that data stored in your local jurisdiction is not accessible to law enforcement abroad. And the US judiciary initially agreed with that: https://petri.com/microsoft-wins-appeal-data-stored-abroad-s...

...which then led to the US CLOUD act and here we are, once again, proving that the past is alterable; just like Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

idkfasayer• 8 months ago

In theory, there is rule of law, the intention of which is to prevent government's access to your property and body without a court order and any emergency access such as use of force at crime scenes being subject to public scrutiny. I guess that was the idea when the USA was established as a country, but people forgot what their ancestors where fighting for.

jeppester• 9 months ago

Anyone who's read the law has known this for years.

The GDPR is incompatible with the Cloud Act, and so the only legal (or so it should be) way to use US companies is to treat them like unsafe third countries - no matter the data center location.

But everyone wants to continue like before. Having to ensure that Amazon and Azure never touches unincrypted personal data is hard. So one "compromise" after another has been tried - never solving the actual problem.

As a EU citizen I think it's entirely embarrassing. Either the EU should have the power to force European subsidiaries to be exempted from the cloud act, or everyone should be forced to abide the law, which would greatly boost EU tech. Instead we are just rolling over.

penguin_booze• 9 months ago

U.S. companies can be forced to hand over data, regardless of where it is stored

s/U.S./Chinese/

Tomato <=> Tomato

nashashmi• 9 months ago

US cloud act is definitely an overreach. Suddenly private infrastructure is now an extension of the government surveillance complex. This is the equivalent of the govt being able to put a camera on your building because they want to observe the public/private area around it.

Agingcoder4• 9 months ago

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway, with my keys ? If the crypto is strong enough then surely cloud providers can’t do anything with it ?

cesarb3• 9 months ago

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway

"Cloud" is not only for storage; it's also for compute. Doing compute directly on encrypted data (homomorphic encryption) is very slow and very complicated, so when using a cloud, the data is usually either unencrypted, or encrypted but the key is elsewhere in the same cloud.

Agingcoder4• 9 months ago

Thanks.

I get that FHE is not realistic today, but can’t I use ( if it’s really critical) a combination of confidential vms and an external hsm ? I understand I’ll be limited to traditional workloads , and not managed services though.

I asked the wrong question, what I really meant was ‘if I run in a less trusted environment, am I not supposed to use all possible crypto mechanisms available to make that environment more trustworthy , so that I can’t be deceived by my cloud operator sending my data to the us government’

riskable• 9 months ago

Another take: Microsoft admitted under oath in France that the US government doesn't care enough about French data to ever have requested any.

I'm sure if you asked the current administration what they think of France, they'd reply, "all they do is wine!"

thefz• 9 months ago

The current administration will have difficulties pointing to France on a map.

thinkindie• 9 months ago

I wonder why people are surprised, as this is an open secret nobody is willing to admit. And it's basically the reason we had Schrim I and Schrim II.

At the same time a massive migration from US cloud in EU to EU cloud would be a massive pain for a lot of companies in the EU.

Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities

Related Stories