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Austrian DPA rules Microsoft 365 Education breaches EU GDPR: unlawful tracking, deficient access responses; schools/ministry joint controllers, Microsoft independent controller; US parent, not Irish subsidiary, responsible.

Published on: 21 October 2025

Published by an LexisNexis Ireland - Commercial expert
Legal News
Article summary

The Austrian Data Protection Authority (DSB) reported breaches of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), citing illicit student tracking and partial replies to subject access requests. Microsoft 365 Education, a cloud-hosted collection of Microsoft’s productivity applications (such as Teams, Word, Excel and OneDrive), is designed for schools, teachers and pupils. The matter stemmed from a complaint lodged last year by the privacy advocacy group Noyb, representing a student, against her school, the regional education board, Austria’s Ministry of Education, and Microsoft. The complaint alleged that none of these parties properly addressed a request to access personal information handled via Microsoft 365 Education. The DSB concluded that Microsoft had offloaded much of the duty for GDPR adherence onto schools and national bodies, which cannot fully govern or grasp the breadth of processing occurring in the cloud, the decision stated. The regulator further found that the local school and the Ministry of Education functioned as joint controllers, in line with Article 26 of the GDPR, for the handling of student data in Austria...

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