Microsoft said on Thursday it received 75,378 law enforcement requests for data last year in the tech giant’s first report on the subject.
The requests, which included those for the Skype messaging and voice service, potentially impacted 137,424 accounts, Microsoft said on its corporate citizenship Web page.
Microsoft said that “customer content” was released in just 2.1 percent of cases.
However, “non-content” information, which can include subscriber information such as the e-mail address, name, location and IP address was released in 79.8 percent of requests to the company, excluding Skype.
The company said Skype, which Microsoft acquired in 2011, did not provide any “content” in response to the 4,713 requests, but did provide a Skype ID and other identifiers in more than 500 cases.
“In recent months, there has been broadening public interest in how often law enforcement agencies request customer data from technology companies and how our industry responds to these requests,” Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said.
“Google, Twitter and others have made important and helpful contributions to this discussion by publishing some of their data. We’ve benefited from the opportunity to learn from them and their experience, and we seek to build further on the industry’s commitment to transparency by releasing our own data today,” he added.
Smith said the data suggest “that less than 0.02 percent of active users were affected” by data requests.
“Microsoft is committed to respecting human rights, free expression and individual privacy,” he said, but added that “like every company, we are obligated to comply with legally binding requests from law enforcement.”
Smith said two-thirds of the requests to Microsoft excluding Skype which resulted in any disclosure came from five countries — the US, Britain, Turkey, Germany and France.
For Skype, the top five countries accounted for 81 percent of all requests — Taiwan, the US, Britain, Germany and France.
Microsoft said that like Google, it had received so-called National Security Letters from the FBI as part of terrorism investigations, but could not divulge exact numbers.
In 2009 and last year, Microsoft received between zero and 999 of these requests, and between 1,000 and 1,999 in 2010 and 2011.
A US judge last week ruled that the use of these letters was unconstitutional because it denied due process to citizens. However, the judge allowed the measures to remain in place pending an appeal.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained