Daniel Stoller

Few companies have more riding on proposed privacy legislation than Google and Facebook.

Microsoft is calling on governments to follow a set of principles for cross-border data access policies, including independent judicial review and dispute resolution mechanisms. Microsoft’s Sept. 11 call for law enforcement data access standards follows the European Commission’s introduction recently of proposed e-evidence legislation. In March, Congress passed legislation governing how U.S. law enforcement can access data overseas.

The Trump administration likely will seek public comment on a new online privacy proposal it is hammering out with tech companies before sending it to Congress. The White House is working with technology giants on a legislative proposal through the National Economic Council and the Commerce Department.

An order that Alphabet's Google turn over customer data stored overseas relied more on the specific storage technology at play than on an outdated federal e-mail privacy law. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled April 19 that Google must turn over customer data stored overseas subject to a valid search warrant issued in June 2016 under the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2701. The ruling may not offer real clarity sought by companies that store large amounts of data in the cloud, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, on whether they must comply with government demands for the release of consumer data stored outside the US. But it does offer some insight into how courts may parse the technological issues surrounding the storage of data and identification of the consumers tied to that data by focusing on the ability of the company to readily identify the citizenship of a particular user.