A week after being caught snooping through the hotmail account of an unnamed French journalist who published some company secrets, Microsoft says it will no longer search through customers' emails and chat messages when it suspects evil-doing.
Instead, it will act just like anyone else whenever they suspect a crime is being committed: It will call the cops. "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," Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, wrote in a Friday blog post. "Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required."
People don't like it when people take the law into their own hands. Just ask George Zimmerman. --Hanni Fakhoury, EFF
Call it a victory for privacy advocates or the end of Microsoft's flirtation with vigilante justice. Either way, it's a remarkable sign of how things have changed over the past year, says Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The public has gotten wise post-Snowden," she says, referring to ex-government contractor Edward Snowden, who exposed the widespread online surveillance campaign of the NSA. "If companies want users to trust their services, it's time for companies to get with the program and commit themselves to privacy policies that actually do something to protect user privacy."
Ozer and other privacy advocates object to the policies of web giants such as Google and Microsoft, which give them the right to snoop through our webmail if they determine that we've somehow violated our end-user license agreements. Last week, Microsoft argued that it needed to do this, because courts "do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves." But that rationale didn't sit well with folks like Nicole Ozer and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "People don't like it when people take the law into their own hands," says Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney with the EFF. "Just ask George Zimmerman."
With Microsoft's policy reversal, one of the big web companies has pledged to do the right thing. The question is, what about all of the others? We asked Google. "While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way," Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said in an emailed statement.
In other words, others are not necessarily making the same promise as Microsoft. But then again, nobody else has been caught.
