Security Agencies Eager to Get Hold of User Data: Microsoft’s Transparency Report

Microsoft announced the launch of a new transparency website in order to provide free access to the transparency reports published by the firm.

Microsoft’s latest Transparency Hub entails a report comprising of information about the requests received by the tech giant from various parties regarding the elimination of online content.

This new website also lets users access the Law Enforcement Requests Report and the United States’ Security Orders Report that covers the first two quarters of 2015.

As per the report, a slight increase is evident in the rates of requests made during the last two-quarters of 2014.

Nonetheless, the report doesn’t include the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders because these are subject to a 6-monthly reporting interval.

Microsoft disclosed that around 35,228 requests were made by the law enforcement agencies for customer information within the first six months of 2015.

Around 72.7% of these requests came from the law enforcement organizations in 5 different countries including the US, UK, France, Germany and Turkey.

The Redmond-based tech firm also noted that just 3% of the requests were entertained. 

The number of requests received in 2015 was higher than those received in the second half of 2014 (which was 31,002).

Moreover, the number of requests that were rejected due to not meeting the legal requirements was 4,383 or 12% in the said six-month period. 

This number is also almost double the figures of 2014’s last half, that is, 2,342 rejected requests.

This launch from Microsoft also marks the primary release of the firm’s Content Removal Requests Report.

This report includes information about requests made to Microsoft regarding removal of content or links on the Bing search engine.

Out of 72.7% requests only 3% were entertained: Microsoft

The senders of such requests were governments as well and these demands were based upon violations of local rules/laws as well as Microsoft’s terms of service, infringement of protected content from copyright owners and also from European citizens citing the “Right to be Forgotten” ruling from the European Court of Justice.