Because “Trust Us Bro” Isn’t Encryption

In a move that will shock only the people who think “European data sovereignty” is a decorative phrase on an EU brochure, Switzerland’s Conference of Data Protection Officers has delivered a polite but unmistakable get stuffed to Microsoft 365 and pretty much every SaaS behemoth on the planet.

Privatim’s new resolution reads like the diplomatic version of an eye-roll. It calmly explains — for the thousandth time — that most hyperscale SaaS still can’t offer actual end-to-end encryption, the kind where not even the vendor can pry into your documents. An obvious requirement, you’d think, for a government handling sensitive personal data and legally protected records. But apparently not obvious enough for the cloud companies still insisting that “don’t worry, we pinky-promise not to look” counts as a security guarantee.

And then there’s the US CLOUD Act, that magical piece of legislation allowing American authorities to reach across borders and hoover up data from US companies, no matter where the servers sit. Switzerland — not exactly known for its laissez-faire attitude toward confidentiality — was never going to let that slide. Privatim effectively says: If you can’t stop foreign governments from helping themselves to our data, you don’t get to store it.

But the most devastating line is their observation that SaaS providers can change their terms whenever they want, leaving public institutions helplessly refreshing pages of legalese just to find out how their security posture evaporated overnight. “Significant loss of control” is Swiss for: “Why are we putting mission-critical data in services we don’t control, run by corporations whose business model is ‘trust us until we pivot’?”

When regulators single out Microsoft 365 by name as “inappropriate,” that’s the diplomatic version of a mugshot on a wanted poster.

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