Does Microsoft Have the Right To Search Your Email?

Microsoft has long run a
campaign to convince people that its email service, Outlook, is
safe. They assure that
“Outlook.com prioritizes your privacy” and “your email is nobody
else’s business.” That privacy ends, though, if Microsoft itself
says it has a good reason to snoop through your emails or chat
logs.

Last week, the company
accused one of its former employees, Alex Kibkalo, of leaking
trade secrets. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
wrote last Wednesday that “Kibkalo is alleged to have leaked
Windows 8 code to a French technology blogger in mid-2012, prior to
the software’s release.” The blogger is unnamed in the court
complaint, and the leaks amounted to “screenshots of
a pre-release version” of the operating system.

How’d Microsoft figure all this out? Company investigators went
snooping through private messages of the blogger, who used Outlook,
in order to hunt down Kibkalo.

John Frank, Microsoft’s general counsel, argues that this is no
big deal
because:

courts do not… issue orders authorizing someone to search
themselves, since obviously no such order is needed.  So even
when we believe we have probable cause, there’s not an applicable
court process for an investigation such as this one relating to the
information stored on servers located on our own premises.

He also assures that the company’s terms and services allow them
to do this.

Harry McCracken of TIME expresses some sympathy for
Microsoft, noting that
among all other potential illegal deals transpiring over Outlook,
“the one sort of case in which we know that Microsoft thinks it’s
OK for it to spy on your e-mail without a warrant is when you might
be stealing its own stuff.”

Others are more skeptical. Edward Wasserman, the dean of the
Graduate School of Journalism at University of California,
Berkeley,
told The New York Times, “I have never seen a case
like this. Microsoft essentially decided that whatever privacy
expectation that its own customers supposedly had was basically a
dead letter.”

“Microsoft clearly believes that the users’ personal data
belongs to Microsoft, not the users themselves,” Ginger McCall of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center
said to CNN.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt
predicts that this “is hugely damaging to the
company,” more so than just letting the leaks just pass.

Either way, Microsoft is now doing damage control.
They’re revamping
their privacy policy and issued a
statement that they “vow to go through a more stringent
process” before reading people’s emails again.