Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

theregister.com

13 points·rntn··5 comments

It’s so funny (sad) to see all these EU sovereign and nationalistic politicians remain silent about this.

The Italian public administration has given €2 billion to Microsoft (!) over the past three years, and this doesn’t even include all the software license fees paid by various public administrations.

I would like to hear Amazon answer the same question under oath.

https://aws.eu/

Can any company?

If a company has a presence in any nation and they're asked for data by the local government or courts, can the guarantee the data won't be turned over?

I don't think so.

That's not a defense of Microsoft or current government policy, but I just don't know that anyone can make this promise honestly.

Not if they are in the US, which is why the EU should be developing and supporting their own tech industry more often instead of depending on US companies which can't be trusted to keep their data safe. That said, not every US company wants, or is able, to collect the massive amounts of data on you and what you're doing on your devices that Microsoft does.

The solution is for tech companies to stop collecting and keeping data on their users in the first place, like signal used to before they started keeping people's sensitive data in the cloud. That way when the US government comes asking the only answer is "we don't have anything to give you"

It would be a major case of "You would be way more mad if they could." It would basically call for Microsoft to be a sovereign entity more powerful than all "traditional" nations. If that would count as an improvement to the status quo then things have fallen far indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com