Microsoft has released information regarding requests from various governments and government agencies to audit the accounts and data of the company's subscribers.
Specifically, the American company announced that it received 35,083 requests from various government agencies worldwide in the second half of 2013, which concerned 58,676 email accounts. In total, for 2013, Microsoft received 72,999 requests, which concerned 125,215 accounts.
The data shows that the requests have decreased slightly compared to 2012, when there were 75,378 requests for 137,424 accounts. Obviously, the decrease is not impressive, which is perhaps what many would have expected after the noise created around illegal surveillance in the previous months.
According to Microsoft data, 76% of requests resulted in the disclosure of non-content data, while in 21% of all requests, no data of any kind was disclosed. User content was disclosed in only 2.32% of cases.
Of the total requests, there were only three court orders involving data related to services offered by businesses, involving 15 accounts. Furthermore, of Microsoft's hundreds of millions of accounts, only 0.01% of them were affected.
The largest volume of requests came from the various security agencies of the United States, reaching a rate of 80%. Globally, the most requests to investigate user accounts came from the US, Turkey, Germany, France and the UK.
In fact, in its announcement, Microsoft notes that there should be international cooperation on the issue of publishing user personal data, precisely because the requests come from many different governments with different individual laws.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
