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They're Reading Your Mail: Microsoft's ToS, Windows 8 Leak, and Snooping
After the recent Windows 8 leak by recently arrrested then-Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo, Microsoft has tweaked its privacy policies, but also defended reading the email of the French blogger to whom Kibkalo sent the software.
"The blogger in question, who remains unidentified, happened to use Hotmail—the investigation began in 2012 before Hotmail's Outlook.com transition—as his primary email account. So as part of its investigation, Microsoft peeked into the blogger's email account to read that person's correspondence with Kibkalo. ... Microsoft says it was justified in searching the blogger's email account, because it had probable cause to believe Kibkalo was funneling trade secrets to the blogger.The company also pointed out that even with its justification for searching the account, it would have been impossible to gain a court order."
"The legal system wouldn't have let us" seems a strange argument to defend any act of snooping.
Here's what Michael Arrington, former editor of TechCrunch, says:
ABOUT THAT TIME GOOGLE SPIED ON MY GMAIL
Much as I hate to defend Microsoft, the summary mischaracterises Microsoft's statement. Microsoft is saying that it already had the right to search the mailbox, so a court would not have issued an order. It's like asking a court for permission to search your own house. The court won't issue an order, but that doesn't mean that it would be illegal to do the search.
I don't know if Microsoft is right in its claim that it would not have been able to get a court order, but let's get the facts straight when criticising Microsoft.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
While this story is crazy, and MS should be spitballed for it... I don't buy that other companies that let your store your data online don't give access to your data to their employee, if only for "debugging and administrative purposes." If you want to store your data online encrypt it.
Here is to Microsofts shit ad campaign "Scroogled" - first they snoop on all Skype communication and now they admit to reading emails LOOKING for things.
I fully expect the daft ad men at Microsoft to continue their pathetic ad campaign.
Glass houses and all that.
Not to defend Microsoft's actions, but this does seem like exceptionally poor judgement on the part of the leaker, on par with robbing a bank and having them put the money in your safe deposit box.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I suspect that certain MS managers and system administrators should now refrain from traveling to the EU for the next few years. Under EU law, you may not even look at email of your employees without having gotten a signed waiver on paper or a court order.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> Does ownership of the network override the laws of the country the network is in?
It's not a legal question at all. If you use the service you have accepted their terms and so have given them permission to do this.
> If they had opened physical mail, this would be a criminal charge. But because it's digital, somehow ownership of the service exempts them from having to obey any kind of privacy laws.
The fact it's digital doesn't make it a special case, if you agreed to let them open your physical mail they could do that too.
> Dangerous and shows why you should not trust anything online.
You shouldn't trust anyone on line, that's true. However this isn't the best example of that, but it is a good example of why you should read the T&C of anything you sign up to.
Companies can write all the terms they want, they shouldn't be able to override the laws already in place.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
> It's not a legal question at all. If you use the service you have accepted their terms and so have given them permission to do this.
That *is* a legal question. If the EULA says: we own your first born, is that so just because you checked a box on a web site? Nope. There are laws governing the reading of email, and Microsoft has to obey those rules like everyone else.
Remember kids...
Do not store incriminating evidence on the servers of the company you're trying to screw.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
All multinationals are hypocrites. All advertising is an attempt at making people believe things that are at best only part true.
If you give your data away you don't have it anymore. Don't give Google, Microsoft, or anyone else all your private email.
Has anyone seen a TOS that does not give the company rights of ownership of you, yours, and all things associated with everything else they can cram into the TOS? I've often wondered why TOS are so wordy. I would simply write, "Do you confirm that you are our bitch and everything yours is now ours?".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
If a contract contains a clause that abrogates inalienable rights then that clause can be deemed as unenforceable and should be removed in order that you have a fair contract fully agreed by both parties. If that part cannot be removed then the whole contract is null and void. This is basic contract law.
Of course this relies on the agreement of a EULA forming a valid contract in the first place due to there being no signatories, other identifying marks or even a verbal agreement noted on it. A click on a button is not any of those, yet somehow it *is* a legally binding contract when the company wants it to be but never is when the other party wants it to be. And they have an army of lawyers who will bankrupt you if you don't like it.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Not to defend Microsoft's actions, but this does seem like exceptionally poor judgement on the part of the leaker, on par with robbing a bank and having them put the money in your safe deposit box.
That's true. And in your analogy, the bank couldn't just open up your safety deposit box. In that case, law enforcement would have to obtain a warrant in order to open your safe deposit box. The question is not wether the leaker made a bad call by sending it to the blogger's hotmail account, it wether Microsoft had the right to search the blogger's (it wasn't even the employee's account) emails.
"Courts do not, however, issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed," Microsoft Deputy General Counsel John Frank explained in the blog post. "So even when we believe we have probable cause, there’s not an applicable court process for an investigation such as this one."
Preventing this situation is exactly why private entities aren't allowed to get court order for searches...because that's law enforcement's job! If they truly had probably cause, then the legal course of action would have been to present that probably cause to law enforcement, which law enforcement could then use to obtain a court order. Since the guy got arrested, this obviously went beyond a civil matter. I hope to hell that this evidence is thrown out of court as being inadmissible, because it needs to be made clear that this type of behavior is not legal. Then again, MS probably figures if the federal government doesn't have to follow the law to search private emails, then why should they?
Clicking a check box does not overrule the law. You ignore my "stupid analogy" because you don't have a counter-argument.