EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process sensitive government data – OSnews

Home > Legal > EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process sensitive government data<br>The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC.

↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC<br>The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose. The Americans voted en masse (not voting is a vote for the winner!) for Trump twice, and there’s no indication they won’t vote for such an anti-Europe basket case again. Their opinions and attitudes towards Europeans are clear: they dislike us deeply, and after the last few years, there’s no going back. Violating trust is easy; restoring it takes decades. Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is, therefore, a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.<br>Of course, many members states are addicted to the cloud services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so there’s going to be many individual member states who simply won’t reduce their dependency on the Americans of their own volition. My own country of origin, The Netherlands, only recently signed off on the sale of its government ID services company and associated personal data to an American company, despite the vast majority of the Dutch House of Representatives telling them not to. As such, it makes sense for the EU to step in and simply making it illegal to hand over sensitive data to the Americans.<br>Of course, we’ve got a long way to go, and I’m sure many of any possible proposed restrictions will be watered down considerably by pressure form major member states. Addiction is a harsh disease.

About The Author

Thom Holwerda

Follow me on Mastodon @[email protected]

10 Comments

2026-05-13 8:58 pm

sukru Well…<br>EU already had "data nativity" for cloud operations for maybe a decade. It started with Microsoft, and I believe others have it as well.<br>Long story short, Microsoft does not own the Azure datacenters they use in EU, but it is a third party that is specifically built for this purpose. They later modified this… but most of the main idea stays.<br>So… any user data that resides on those will not be subject to US jurisdiction, but the EU one.<br>So… I’m not sure why EU is up in arms about this one. Are they wanting to also economically sever from likes of Microsoft?<br>And then I’d say "good luck", since they cannot get the same service, and actual privacy and security at the same cost levels from any EU native provider.

Log in to Reply

2026-05-14 2:56 am

DannyBackx If a EU company were to have its data in Microsoft Cloud, on EU soil, as per the rules; do you really think that makes them any less vulnerable to a US-operated killswitch in the software that allows access to it ?

Same for Google and Amazon of course.

The US says Huawei is not to be trusted but the same applies here, even if the data is on our soil.<br>It’s long overdue for us to grow up.

Log in to Reply

2026-05-14 4:00 am

Alfman verbose=1 DannyBackx,<br>If a EU company were to have its data in Microsoft Cloud, on EU soil, as per the rules; do you really think that makes them any less vulnerable to a US-operated killswitch in the software that allows access to it ?

"Killswitch" seems like the wrong word to use for privacy issues. Obviously MS could create a "backdoor", but they probably don’t even need one because they already control the front door. Also, the US government "legally" snoops in other countries under the "Five Eyes" alliance. Although they would deny it, they were caught red handed violating the laws of US and other countries behind the scenes and nobody ever faced consequences.<br>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes<br>The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[1] These countries are party to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence

The alliance’s activities, often shrouded in secrecy, have occasionally come under scrutiny for their implications on privacy and civil liberties, sparking debates and legal challenges. In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress and British Parliament. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries".[10] Disclosures in the 2010s revealed FVEY was spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the collected information with each other, although the FVEY nations maintain this was done legally

The government’s response tends to be "let’s cover our tracks better and make examples of the whistleblowers". I...