Microsoft plans to establish new data centers in Germany, which has rigorous data-protection laws, in an attempt to shield customers from U.S. surveillance, the company said Wednesday.
The tech giant said it will provide cloud services, including Azure and Office 365, from facilities in Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main.
The centers are slated to be up and running in the second half of 2016 and will “offer customers choice and trust in how their data is handled and where it is stored,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.
They’ll be operated in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, he added, and “will not only spur local innovation and growth, but offer customers choice and trust in how their data is handled and where it is stored.”
Speaking at a presentation in Berlin on Wednesday, Mr. Nadella said that the facilities “will ensure that customers’ data remains in Germany and that a German company controls access to data in accordance with German law,” the Economic Times reported.
“We need to earn both trust of our global customers and operate globally. That’s at the cornerstone of how we’ve done business and how we will continue to do business,” he told the Financial Times this week.
The European Court of Justice decided last month to strike down the so-called Safe Harbor pact between the European Union and U.S. that had allowed foreign companies to transmit personal user data to servers in America without running afoul of any local privacy laws in the process.
Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence analyst who leaked NSA documents to the media, said that the Safe Harbor agreement had been “abused” in by the U.S. government under an interpretation of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provision that “allowed a U.S. official to authorize spies to monitor people without court orders.”
In the wake of his unauthorized disclosures, the European Court of Justice began weighing in 2013 whether or not to invalidate the agreement.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has been involved in a court case in New York in which federal prosecutors have insisted the company provide authorities with emails from a U.S. citizen that’s stored on a Microsoft server in Ireland.
Although the Silicon Valley company stands a chance at losing that fight, establishing data centers in Germany should mandate that all digital information stored there will soon be subject to local laws that will provide more protection than most other locales, including the U.S.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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