Microsoft Backtracks On Searching Your E-mail

You might recall that Microsoft started a bit of a storm by hunting through Hotmail e-mail to find the source of leak. The software giant then reserved the right to do so in the future. Now they’ve backtracked on that via a blog posting from Brad Smith who is General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs for Microsoft:

Effective immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves. Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required.

In addition to changing company policy, in the coming months we will incorporate this change in our customer terms of service, so that it’s clear to consumers and binding on Microsoft.

Either Microsoft wants to retain the trust of its users, thus they made this change. Or they just want the blowback to stop. Either way this should have been done a long time ago.

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