Microsoft Publishes 2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report

Microsoft's Legal & Corporate Affairs Executive Vice President Brad Smith announced on Microsoft's Tech Net blog that the company has released its first Law Enforcement Requests Report. The report details law enforcement data requests worldwide for information from the company's cloud and online services, including how it responded to the requests.

According to the announcement, Microsoft's first report includes information about data requests and responses for its various services, including Xbox LIVE, Outlook.com and Hotmail, Microsoft Account, and Office 365. It will continue to update this report twice a year (every six months) with new information. In addition, the company is also releasing data related to Skype, which it acquired a little over a year ago.

This move is to provide the public with information on consumer data requests and how they are responded to, providing transparency and contributing to the information on the topic already provided by other companies in the industry. The information is split by country, and shows how often the requests for each country are responded to with the data being handed over.

The report shows that Microsoft received 75,378 requests from various law enforcement agencies in 2012 concerning 137,424 accounts. Out of this large number, 2.1-percent of them resulted in Microsoft providing the requested information, a total of 1,558. Specifically, that 2.1-percent represents instances when the company provided content stored in/on the customer's account, but not what it calls "non-consumer" data, which includes things like email addresses.

[via TechNet]