^--- this

It is completely impossible to comply with European privacy law if you are using up-to-date Windows for your business.

The US CLOUD Act compels companies to provide access to data on machines they have the technical ability to access.

Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft granted itself the ability to pull locally-stored documents out of (non-onedrive) folders on all machines for "debugging" purposes.

Since then, EU courts overturned the Privacy Shield deal with the US because our laws are in direct contradiction with their privacy protections, so no, there isn't some backstop that lets Microsoft be the good actor if they get a bogus warrant.

If the EU could ban Windows, I'm sure they would have done so already.

Source on "they can read your files": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...

Note that this policy began in the Windows 8 days, and didn't originally have the Microsoft 365 branding attached to it. Now that Windows 11 mandates login, they changed the wording.