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Slashdot: Did Microsoft Hide Key Data Flow Information In Plain Sight?

Did Microsoft Hide Key Data Flow Information In Plain Sight?
Published on September 28, 2025 at 12:04AM
An anonymous reader shared this report from Computer Weekly: Policing data hosted in Microsoft's hyperscale cloud infrastructure could be processed in more than 100 countries, but the tech giant is obfuscating this information from its customers, Computer Weekly can reveal. According to documents released by the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) under freedom of information (FoI) rules, Microsoft refused to hand over crucial information about its international data flows to the SPA and Police Scotland when asked... The tech giant also refused to disclose its own risk assessments into the transfer of UK policing data to other jurisdictions, including China and others deemed "hostile" in the DPIA documents. This means Police Scotland and the SPA — which are jointly rolling out Office 365 — are unable to satisfy the law enforcement-specific data protection rules laid out in Part Three of the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA18), which places strict limits on the transfer of policing data outside the UK. The same documents also contain an admission from Microsoft — given while simultaneously refusing to divulge key information about data flows — that it is unable to guarantee the sovereignty of policing data held and processed within its O365 infrastructure. This echoes the statements senior Microsoft representatives made to the French senate in June 2025, in which they admitted the company cannot guarantee the sovereignty of European data stored and processed in its services generally. The revelation that Microsoft may access customer data from more than 100 countries is a result of the correspondence previously disclosed under Freedom of Information and reported on by Computer Weekly... All in all, an analysis of Microsoft's distributed documentation — conducted by independent security consultant Owen Sayers and shared with Computer Weekly — suggests that Microsoft personnel or contractors can remotely access the data from 105 different countries, using 148 different sub-processors. Despite technically being public, Sayers highlighted how this information is not transparently laid out for Microsoft customers, and is distributed across different documents contained in non-indexed webpages.... "[A]ny normal amount of due diligence — even if it is conducted by skilled persons will likely fail to see the full scope of offshoring in play," he said... Microsoft did not contest the accuracy of the remote access location figures cited by Computer Weekly in this story.

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