Google is making changes to their Terms Of Service, which become effective 31 March 2020. Within these changes, it has been stated that UK citizen data will be moved to the US – under the control of their US entity, Google LLC – moving it away from the Northern Ireland (ie UK-based) territory where it is currently stored.

This decision is in light of Brexit as the UK will no longer be part of the EU. User data will now be stored in the US, which has been criticised by privacy activists, querying the legal integrity,security, and safety of the data stored.

Google will be moving all account data over to the US, including paid G Suite accounts. However, higher tier G Suite paid Business and Enterprise plans can elect to choose where their data is stored – see here for more information. It is also announced that soon similar changes will be made to the Terms Of Service for YouTube, YouTube Paid Services and Google Play. Privacy settings can be reviewed and managed via Google Accounts at accounts.google.com.

Jumbo’s (a privacy settings management app) creator, Pierre Valade, stated “Privacy is something that people want, but at the same time it just takes too much time for you and me to act on it”. Jumbo limits the amount of time that Google stores your search results and other behavioural data, and also works on Twitter, Facebook and Amazon’s Alexa. However, this does not solve the issue of Google moving the data for their core services such as Gmail and Drive to the US.

Although not necessarily wanted, it is legal for Google to move such user data to the US. Google has responded to fears, claiming they (Google LLC) would be subject to the same restrictions under GDPR regardless of whether UK user data is in the UK or the US. And therefore there will be no changes in data protection standards.
You can read Google’s full documentation on the upcoming changes here: policies.google.com/terms/changes