New poll: Growing concern in Ireland over online data privacy

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Today we released a new poll showing that a large majority of Irish people want strong privacy protections for their online data, and they expect the government to stand up for Irish law when other countries disagree.

  • 87 percent agree their personal information in the cloud deserves the same privacy protections as that stored on paper.
  • 89 percent say a foreign government should not be able to demand personal information stored in Ireland without liaising with the Irish government.
  • 89 percent believe that a company operating in Ireland should be subject to Irish law and not to the law of the land where the company’s headquarters is located.

These results reflect the reasons why we continue to challenge a U.S. court-ordered warrant for data held in a Microsoft European Data Center in Dublin. People believe there needs to be balance between efforts to fight crime in the U.S. and privacy protections important to us in Ireland and others around the world. In fact, only 9 percent of those polled said Microsoft should be allowed to comply with the U.S. court order.

This case has important implications for Ireland and Europe. The Irish public and Irish industry strongly support the principles Microsoft is advancing in this case. The Irish Minister for Data Protection, Dara Murphy, is fully engaged on these issues, and we would ask the Irish Government to continue to provide its full support to protect Irish law, Irish citizens and Irish industry.

This poll also shows similar results to one conducted over the summer in the United States, in which 86 percent of Americans agreed that law enforcement should have to follow the same legal requirements for obtaining personal information stored in the cloud as that stored on paper.

Microsoft’s challenge to the warrant is currently being considered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The survey was conducted by Amarach Consulting during November 2014 and is available here.

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This article is cross posted from the official Microsoft on the Issues blog.