Microsoft ordered to hand over overseas email, throwing EU privacy rights in the ...
Summary: US law can apply anywhere in the world, so long as a technology company has control over foreign data, a court rules.
A US judge has ordered Microsoft to hand over foreign data it stores back to the US, despite allegedly strong privacy protections in Europe to mitigate such processes.
The logic of the court is that because the US-headquartered software giant controls the data it stores overseas, its foreign subsidiary companies are just as applicable to US law.
US District Judge Loretta Preska in New York said the ruling will be stayed to allow Microsoft to appeal the decision to an appeals court.
The ruling means that users of Microsoft's services - and others, including Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter, with a headquarters in the US - in Europe and further afield are not immune from having their data handed over to the US government for law enforcement or intelligence purposes.
Microsoft initially challenged the order, saying that local laws must apply in respect of each jurisdiction.
Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith argued in an opinion-editorial piece for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that the US government 'can't force American tech companies to turn over customer emails stored exclusively in company data centers in other countries.'
'Microsoft believes you own emails stored in the cloud, and that they have the same privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail. This means, in our view, that the U.S. government can obtain emails only subject to the full legal protections of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment.'
But because the case rests on data stored by Microsoft in its Dublin, Ireland-based datacenter, that data should also fall under the purview of Irish and European data protection laws, to which Ireland is a member state.
New proposals set to come into force following extensive scrutiny and voting later this, or next year, will reform Europe's data protection laws, to prevent a European subsidiary of a parent company, such as in the US, from handing over data to a third-country for law enforcement or intelligence purposes.
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