Danish official warns data stored on US cloud is shared with American spies
Claus Balslev, a head of digitalization at Denmark’s labor agency, has said out loud what many privately fear: data uploaded on an American cloud is directly shared with US intelligence agencies.
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A Danish official has warned that data uploaded to a US cloud is shared directly with American intelligence agencies.
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There’s growing concern in Europe that American cloud providers are legally required to hand over the data of Europeans to US spies.
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Three American cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, control 70% of the European cloud market.
Danish newspaper Ingeniøren described Balslev’s statement as “the words that no CEO has ever dared to utter,” saying that “the bird is now out of the cage.”
The Danish Agency for Labor Market and Recruitment (STAR) holds sensitive data about the illness and unemployment of millions of Danes. Under Balslev, the agency migrated from Microsoft to German and French cloud services in nine months.
While Balslev’s statement may be considered bold for an official, fears about the privacy of data hosted on US clouds are not new.
The US laws, such as the 2018 Cloud Act, compel American companies to provide data requested by US law enforcement agencies regardless of where it is stored.
Data privacy concerns play a major role in Europe’s push for digital independence from the US, as three American providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – control 70% of the European cloud market.
US cloud providers deny granting the country’s law enforcement easy access to European’s data.
For example, AWS states it hasn’t disclosed any enterprise or government content data stored outside the US to the US government since 2020, when the company started reporting the statistics.
However, Microsoft was recently accused of leaking data of Dutch civil servants working for the Netherlands' regulatory agencies to the US House of Representatives.
The employees whose emails, minutes, and invitations were allegedly leaked are working on implementing the EU digital laws, which are fiercely criticized by the Donald Trump administration.
Denmark is especially sensitive to potential US spying, as Trump repeatedly pressured the European nation into ceding control of Greenland, a territory rich in critical raw materials and minerals, and refused to rule out using military force.
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