OVHcloud legal eagle on Microsoft's sovereignty admission
OVHCloud are (rightfully) making plentiful hay from Microsoft's admission that data sovereignty is a joke under US law:
"[Microsoft] finally told the truth!" says OVHcloud Chief Legal Officer Solange Viegas Dos Reis. "It's not a surprise," she shrugs, "we already knew that [MS could not guarantee that customer data would remain protected from US government access requests]." However, "this reply from Microsoft brought kind of a shock for customers, because they suddenly discover that what they have been taught for a while. 'Oh guys, don't worry, it will not apply to you. Don't worry.' It's false! Because, indeed, the data can be communicated."
Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, made the admission during a hearing in the country. In answer to whether he could guarantee that data on French citizens could not be transmitted to the US government without the explicit agreement of the French authorities, Carniaux replied: "No, I can't guarantee it," but added that the scenario had "never happened before."
"It's a question of trust," says Viegas Dos Reis. "And because of this question of trust, we have been receiving a lot of questions from our customers about, 'Hey, we know now how it works with US cloud providers. Tell me how it works from other providers.'"
Tags: ovhcloud ovh data-protection data-privacy amazon microsoft google cloud-computing sovereignty eu politics surveillance