#cloud-act

#cloud-act

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Microsoft is again banging the data sovereignty drum in Europe, months after admitting in a French court it couldn't guarantee that data will not be transmitted to the US government when legally required to do so. Under the CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel access to information held by American cloud providers irrespective of where in the world that data is housed. Although Microsoft says it has published transparency reports and no European customers, private or public, were yet the subject of any requests, the threat of the law remains and this is making some nervous.

The United Kingdom has dropped its push to require Apple to provide security officials with backdoor access to users' encrypted iCloud backups, effectively protecting privacy.