Nobody does more to protect your data than Microsoft
Would you go to court to protect your own privacy? Of course you would. What about someone else’s?
Microsoft does it all the time.
In December 2013, we formally challenged the geographic reach of a U.S. criminal search warrant, arguing that email should receive the same treatment as physical documents or other property, where the U.S. Government cannot obtain a search warrant to seize property located outside the United States. The case is on appeal. At issue is customer e-mail content for a single user of our free web-based email service, Outlook.com, which are located exclusively in a datacentre outside the United States, in Dublin, Ireland.
In our view, just as the U.S. government does not have the power to search a home in another country, it should not have the power to search the content of email stored in datacentres overseas. And we are not alone in this belief. On December 13, 2014 we filed our Appeal brief and a few days later a who’s who of the technology industry, academia and the Irish government themselves all filed briefs with the court in support of our position. We continue to fight this battle diligently today.
It’s not that we oppose law enforcement accessing information that could fight crime and manage national security. We just know that there’s a right way to go about these things. We believe the advent of cloud computing should not be used as a blunt force to cut across these established processes. When your data is in one country and the government of another country wants to reach into a data centre and have a look, the laws of the country where the data is stored must be taken into account.
Why? Why would an American company spend considerable time and treasure defending the privacy of UK customers? Why would we fight for the big customers and the little ones all the same? Why regularly disclose the status of all our privacy battles?
Simple: Your data isn’t ours to share. Privacy isn’t a bonus feature. It’s a bedrock principle. And it’s one we’re willing to defend thousands of times per year, all over the world, in a way that no one else will. Nobody does more to protect your data.
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