Microsoft is having to explain itself after they were caught looking into the Hotmail account of a user who they suspected was involved in leaking company secrets. Here’s the details from News.com:
A March 17 court filing by federal prosecutors reveals that Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance approved the decision after confirming that the leaked data in question included proprietary Microsoft code.
According to the filing, Microsoft received a tip from a person who was contacted via Hotmail by the blogger, who wanted to verify that the leaked source code was legitimate. Instead, the tipper went to Steven Sinofsky, then-president of the Windows Division at Microsoft, and told him of the interaction. Sinofsky forwarded the details to Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Investigations department, which investigates external threats and internal information leaks.
“After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s proprietary trade secret on September 7, 2012, Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance approved the content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account,” the filing says. Microsoft’s investigation uncovered e-mails from then-Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo to the unnamed blogger sharing prerelease Windows 8 RT code, according to the filing.
Federal prosecutors have charged Kibkalo, who worked for Microsoft in Lebanon and Russia, with theft of trade secrets.
The blowback was almost instant. Here are more details from News.com:
Edward Wasserman, Graduate School of Journalism dean at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times that he had “never seen a case like this.”
“Microsoft essentially decided that whatever privacy expectation that its own customers supposedly had was basically a dead letter,” he said. “It simply decided that in its own corporate interest, it can intrude on a person’s email.”
That was clearly a fail because Microsoft has decided to revise their privacy policy in the wake of this. But that hasn’t taken the smell away from this incident. One has to wonder if Apple, Google, Yahoo, or your local ISP would do the same thing that Microsoft got caught doing.
UPDATE: Two things. One, I wasn’t clear about how Microsoft updated their terms of service. Here’s a link to a blog post that details the changes. Second, The Guardian has answered my question about whether others can or do what Microsoft has been caught doing. The answer is they have privacy policies that allow them to do the same thing.
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This entry was posted on March 21, 2014 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Microsoft Gets Caught Looking At Hotmail Users E-Mail [UPDATED]
Microsoft is having to explain itself after they were caught looking into the Hotmail account of a user who they suspected was involved in leaking company secrets. Here’s the details from News.com:
A March 17 court filing by federal prosecutors reveals that Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance approved the decision after confirming that the leaked data in question included proprietary Microsoft code.
According to the filing, Microsoft received a tip from a person who was contacted via Hotmail by the blogger, who wanted to verify that the leaked source code was legitimate. Instead, the tipper went to Steven Sinofsky, then-president of the Windows Division at Microsoft, and told him of the interaction. Sinofsky forwarded the details to Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Investigations department, which investigates external threats and internal information leaks.
“After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s proprietary trade secret on September 7, 2012, Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance approved the content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account,” the filing says. Microsoft’s investigation uncovered e-mails from then-Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo to the unnamed blogger sharing prerelease Windows 8 RT code, according to the filing.
Federal prosecutors have charged Kibkalo, who worked for Microsoft in Lebanon and Russia, with theft of trade secrets.
The blowback was almost instant. Here are more details from News.com:
Edward Wasserman, Graduate School of Journalism dean at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times that he had “never seen a case like this.”
“Microsoft essentially decided that whatever privacy expectation that its own customers supposedly had was basically a dead letter,” he said. “It simply decided that in its own corporate interest, it can intrude on a person’s email.”
That was clearly a fail because Microsoft has decided to revise their privacy policy in the wake of this. But that hasn’t taken the smell away from this incident. One has to wonder if Apple, Google, Yahoo, or your local ISP would do the same thing that Microsoft got caught doing.
UPDATE: Two things. One, I wasn’t clear about how Microsoft updated their terms of service. Here’s a link to a blog post that details the changes. Second, The Guardian has answered my question about whether others can or do what Microsoft has been caught doing. The answer is they have privacy policies that allow them to do the same thing.
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This entry was posted on March 21, 2014 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.