Microsoft Corp. said it is going to implement stricter policies to protect its Hotmail account holders from spying and searching activities similar to the recent event done by Alex Kibkalo, a former senior architect in the company.
On March 19, Kibkalo was arrested for supposedly stealing trade secrets related to Windows 8 during his tenure with Microsoft.
Kibkalo, along with a Russian national Microsoft employee in Lebanon, reportedly forwarded confidential data about Windows 8 to an anonymous blogger in France. He was also reportedly providing links to file on his account.
According to the complaint filed at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, he did such through uploading "proprietary software including prerelease software updates for Windows 8 RT and ARM devices, as well as the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit (SDK) to a computer in Redmond, Washington, and subsequently to his personal Windows Live SkyDrive account."
The incident prompted the software giant to implement "a rigorous process before reviewing [Hotmail accounts of users]," said John Frank, deputy general counsel of the software giant in a blog post.
According to Frank, the company will never search a customer's e-mail unless the case would justify a court order. To obtain a court order, Microsoft must comply with the standards. If the one requesting to search an e-mail claims that the e-mail contains evidences, a legal team from the internal investigating team would assess. However, even if they find evidence sufficient to justify a court order, it will still be reassessed by one of Microsoft's external legal counsels outside the company. If the counsel, who is also a former federal judge, finds the evidence sufficient, the company will move forward.
Conversely, once they are ready to search the e-mail, they will only focus on the subject of investigation, and not look at other things. The search will be supervised by a counsel.
Lastly, CNET reported that to ensure transparency of the searches related to governmental or court orders, Microsoft will include in its bi-annual transparency report information on the number of searches they conducted and number of customers that have been searched.
