Privacy: It’s all about you

Your data is your business, and you can access, modify, or delete it at any time. Microsoft will not use your data without your agreement, and when we have your agreement, we use your data to provide only the services you have chosen.

Your control over your data is reinforced by Microsoft compliance with broadly applicable privacy laws such as the GDPR and privacy standards such as the world’s first international code of practice for cloud privacy, ISO/IEC 27018.

Based on your choice of Microsoft online services, we offer options and tools for determining where your data is stored when you use Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 services. For example, Azure allows you to choose from more than 60 regions linked by one of the largest interconnected networks on the planet including more than 150 datacenters and growing. Microsoft 365 places new customers in the datacenter nearest your business address, with the flexibility to deploy in additional datacenters of your choice.

Because of our large and ever-expanding network of datacenters, Microsoft can offer data residency in more places in the world than any other cloud provider. This helps ensure that resiliency and compliance requirements are honored within geographic boundaries and enables customers with specific data-residency and compliance obligations to keep their data and applications close. We back these capabilities with contractual commitments to store your data within specific geographic boundaries.

Because we believe that you should have control over your own data, we will not disclose data to a government or law enforcement agency, except as you direct or where required by law. Microsoft scrutinizes all government demands to ensure they are legally valid and appropriate.

If Microsoft receives a demand for a customer’s data, we will direct the requesting party to seek the data directly from the customer. If compelled to disclose or give access to any customer’s data, Microsoft will promptly notify the customer and provide a copy of the demand unless legally prohibited from doing so.

Our contractual commitments to our enterprise and public sector customers include Defend Your Data, which builds on our existing protections. We will challenge every government request for commercial and public sector customer data—from any government—where we have a lawful basis for doing so. We have a proven track record of successfully using the courts to challenge government demands that are inconsistent with the rule of law. We have more experience than any other company taking the US government to court to challenge orders seeking access to an individual’s data and to protect our ability to tell customers about those orders, even taking one case to the US Supreme Court. Our challenges have led to greater protections and transparency for our customers worldwide, including enabling us to disclose reports about the number of US national security orders we receive.

We stand behind the strength of our GDPR compliance and other data protection safeguards. To provide added reassurance against liability for our commercial and public sector customers, we will provide monetary compensation if we disclose their data in response to a government request in violation of the EU’s GDPR.