On June 10, 2025 [...] Microsoft France’s Director of Public and Legal Affairs, Mr. Anton Carniaux [...] was asked if he could guarantee that data from French citizens could not be transmitted to United States authorities without the explicit authorization of French authorities.
Mr. Carniaux said that he could not guarantee this.
In other words, if the United States were to issue a legal request to Microsoft for the data of a French citizen hosted in the EU, Microsoft would comply regardless of French or EU law.
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This removes France, Canada, and all other country’s autonomy and sovereignty to control the data it uses in their respective countrys according to their practices and laws.
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Microsoft’s statement means that if they receive a valid legal request from the United States government for data on a Canadian, residing on a Microsoft server in Canada, Microsoft will respond to the request without receiving permission from Canadian authorities.
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United States-based tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and their products play a role in nearly every aspect of our daily lives, whether through software, hardware, Internet hosting, or other means
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Previously, Canada and others have adopted data residency requirements, which requires certain data to be hosted in Canada. There was a believe that this was enough to protect Canada’s sovereignty and our people, but with the United States Cloud Act and an adversarial United States administration, the conditions have changed. Despite these efforts, there have always been concerns that Microsoft and others would ignore data residency. Microsoft has now confirmed that it does not care about data residency or other country’s sovereignty.
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Does this affect the Federal Government and Military?
Yes.
It appears that it does not matter if the target is an individual, organization, or government. As long as the legal request is considered valid in the United States, the target or location of the data does not matter. As an example, the Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces make significant use of Microsoft 365. They have their own defence-tailored instance called Defence 365, which serves as a common cloud infrastructure for collaboration across DND/CAF, with stakeholders and other government departments. In theory, any data on or using Microsoft or a US-based organization’s products and infrastructure which is not isolated from the Internet could be subponeaed by the United States government.
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The current United States administration has shown to base a significant amount of its foreign and economic policy on dubious or false pretenses with little basis in rational, informed evidence or reality. As a result, we cannot expect that all legal requests received by Microsoft or other tech giants will be evidence-based or rational. Thus, this revelation represents a significant risk to the Government of Canada and its military.
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Can Canada and Others Say No?
In theory, yes. But there are a few problems with this.
Canada could say no, but if the information is hosted on Microsoft servers then Microsoft would be able to retrieve this information without the Canadian government knowing. So the user and government will not know unless the United States government or Microsoft informs them. Even in such a case where the user or Canadian government/authorities were informed, it would more or less be, “This is happening and there’s nothing you can do. Your issue is with the United States government, not us.”
In more controlled, secure data environments, it would be more difficult for Microsoft to retrieve this data without some indication informing the user. However, the only likely way to avoid the risk of US legal requests superceding Canadian or other international law is to not use the products of US-based organizations or to keep them disconnected entirely from the Internet.
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This admission from Microsoft France has reaffirmed the importance of data sovereignty and renews concerns about Canada’s ability to trust Microsoft or other non-Canadian companies to provide reliable and secure cloud services. This is likely to add to the growing calls for Canada to develop a sovereign cloud capability, reducing its reliance on major cloud hosts, the majority of which are US-based.
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