Microsoft's Transparency Hub Tracks Surveillance Requests

Microsoft has released transparency figures for the first half of the year and launched a new site to keep all the reports in once place. The Transparency Hub is very similar to Google's Transparency Site, and brings together law enforcement demands and national security orders. It's also the first time Microsoft is showing requests to remove content, both by governments and via Europe's 'right to be forgotten' laws. Redmond is also using the hub to show how it's resisting efforts by governments and police to get at customer data to the full extent of laws, both in the US and abroad.

According to the reports, the trend for data requests has ticked up a bit. Microsoft received 35,228 requests for information from law enforcement around the world, up 14 percent over the second half of 2014. Nearly three-quarters of those came from the US, UK, Turkey, France and Germany. The software giant rejected 4,383 requests for not meeting legal requirements, up nearly double from the previous period. It also disclosed customer content in only 3 percent of cases.

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As for US national security orders, Microsoft must wait at least six months to reveal (very vague) figures, so the report is from the second half of last year. It received less than 1,000 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders affecting between 18-19,000 accounts, and less than 1,000 National Security Letters (NSLs) from the FBI.

Content removal requests fall into three categories: government, copyright removal and 'right to be forgotten' requests. Governments asked Microsoft to pull content from Bing, OneDrive and MSN a total of 186 times, and it accepted the requests 165 times. The bulk (165) came from China. Microsoft complied with 92 percent of the nearly 25 million copyright takedown requests, and agreed to exactly half of the 10,337 right to be forgotten demands.

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Microsoft said it requires that requests for content removal be in writing and informs users when search content has been removed. It also limits the removal of search results to country-specific versions of Bing, something countries like France are fighting. It's hard to say how much people actually care about this stuff, but at least Microsoft, Apple, Google and other tech companies are making it easier to find the info. Of course, the companies might not be doing it at all if not for bruising they took the Edward Snowden revelations.