[Infowarrior] - Microsoft tightens privacy policy after admitting to reading journalist's emails

[Richard Forno]

(Too little, too late.  --rick)

Microsoft tightens privacy policy after admitting to reading journalist's emails

After outrage from privacy campaigners, the tech firm will now seek legal advice before examining the contents of customers’ inboxes

	• Alex Hern
	• theguardian.com, Friday 21 March 2014 06.34 EDT

Microsoft has tightened up its privacy policy after admitting to reading emails from a journalist’s Hotmail account while tracking down a leak.

The new rules prevent the company from snooping on customers’ communications without first convincing two legal teams, independent of the internal investigation, that they have evidence sufficient to obtain a court order were one applicable.

The company did not apologise for the search.

John Frank, vice president and deputy general counsel at the firm, says that following coverage of the case in the Guardian and elsewhere, Microsoft wants “to provide additional context regarding how we approach these issues generally and how we are evolving our policies.

“Courts do not issue orders authorising someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed,” he continues.

“So even when we believe we have probable cause, it’s not feasible to ask a court to order us to search ourselves. However, even we should not conduct a search of our own email and other customer services unless the circumstances would justify a court order, if one were available.”

As well as requiring an internal and external review of the evidence, Frank also promises to confine any future searches “to the matter under investigation and not search for other information”. Finally, he says that the firm will begin to “report the data on the number of these searches that have been conducted and the number of customer accounts that have been affected” in its bi-annual transparency report.

“The only exception to these steps will be for internal investigations of Microsoft employees who we find in the course of a company investigation are using their personal accounts for Microsoft business,” Frank concludes. “And in these cases, the review will be confined to the subject matter of the investigation.”

The initial search occurred in September 2012, when the company was attempting to discover who had handed an anonymous blogger the source code to Windows 8, its then-upcoming operating system. It discovered that the blogger was using a Microsoft Hotmail email address, and that they had used it to send the code to a third party.

“After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012 Microsoft’s office of legal compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account”, said FBI agent Armando Ramirez III in court papers filed Monday.

The company’s user agreement reserves the right to carry out such searches, even after the changes Frank announced. “We may access information about you, including the content of your communications, to protect the rights or property of Microsoft,” it reads.

The news of the search sparked immediate reaction following the Guardian’s report on Thursday.  Parker Higgins, an activist for San Francisco-based pressure group EFF, wrote that the decision was a “very bad move” and that he was “reeling from this Microsoft story. Journalists need to be wary of government and corporate espionage. Knowing your source’s ID is a liability.”

Microsoft has taken a further PR hit due to the fact that email privacy has been a key weapon in its fight against Google’s dominance of the sector.

In the company’s “Scroogled!” campaign, it emphasises that “Outlook.com [the service which replaced Hotmail] prioritises your privacy… Your email is nobody else’s business.” It even offers a petition asking customers to “tell Google to stop! Let them know they shouldn’t go through your email”.

Full statement by John Frank, Microsoft’s vice president and deputy general counsel......

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http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/21/microsoft-tightens-privacy-policy-journalists-emails


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.