Will U.S. tech companies side with their users or the US law?
Our data is valuable, but do we have control over it? If it is with Microsoft or other U.S. tech companies, it is vulnerable to being extracted by the American government. In a recent article by Alexander Rudolph, Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty he explains why we should be concerned.
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.
Under a normal administration in the USA, I don’t know if we would worry about this, but given the current state of things, we should not only be concerned, we need to do something about it. We know that they don’t give due process for their actions. Could they take a copy of our data without proper legal process? …without even asking? This seems a very real possibility. If not today, then when?
U.S. tourism is down, and consumers are doing their best to buy alternative food and other products. (And I feel bad for the people negatively impacted by this.) But the tech billionaires are still getting all the goods from around the world. We need to stop handing over this central part of our daily lives and work together for sovereign data solutions.