Google Has to Hand Over Emails Stored on Foreign Data Centers, Unlike Microsof

[Exterminator]

Google now has to comply with search warrants targeting customer emails stored outside the United States, following a new order issued by a US judge. A previous federal court reached the complete opposite conclusion in a similar case involving Microsoft.

The differences between the orders these two companies have to comply to is massive and opens up a lot of questions regarding people’s privacy. According to the new ruling, transferring emails from a server located in a different country than the United States in order for FBI agents to review them locally as part of a domestic fraud probe does not qualify as seizure.

“When Google produces the electronic data in accordance with the search warrants and the Government views it, the actual invasion of the account holder’s privacy – the searches – will occur in the United States. Though the retrieval of the electronic data by Google from its multiple data centers abroad has the potential for an invasion of privacy, the actual infringement of privacy occurs at the time of disclosure in the United States,” wrote Judge Thomas Rueter.

Google is already planning to appeal the decision, especially since there is a precedent that stated the opposite. “We will continue to push back on overbroad warrants,” Google vows.

According to court papers filed by Google, the company said it sometimes breaks up emails into pieces in order to improve network performance. Therefore, the company itself is not always in the know about where particular emails might be stored.

Google has been complying with warrants as long as the data was stored on US data centers. Nine of its data centers are in the United States, while another six are located abroad – Taiwan, Singapore, Ireland, Netherlands, Finland and Belgium.

The precedent
Back in July, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York concluded that Microsoft cannot be forced to turn over mails to the authorities since they were stored on a Dublin server. It was decided a couple of weeks ago that the decision would not be revisited.

The judges who ordered Google to serve the requested data regardless of the server it was stored on called on to the Supreme Court of the Congress to reverse the previous decision because it hurt law enforcement and raised concerns regarding national security.