EU slams US over Microsoft privacy case

A US attempt to force Microsoft to hand over emails held on servers in Ireland has drawn a strong rebuke from Brussels in one of the first tests of cross-border privacy raised by cloud computing.

The US demand could contravene international law and should have been handled through the official channels normally used for law enforcement between different regions, according to Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission. The demand for information held in a different location from the people it relates to could “hurt the competitiveness of US cloud providers in general”, Microsoft warned in a lawsuit challenging the order this year.