Microsoft: privacy
Microsoft’s U.S. law enforcement and national security requests for last half of 2012 - Microsoft on the Issues - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
Posted by John Frank Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Microsoft
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes “recording agents” to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The “ Legal Intercept ” patent application is one of Microsoft’s more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft’s idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties. The patent was filed well before Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype and there is no reason to believe that the patent was filed with Skype as a Microsoft property in mind. However, the patent mentions Skype explicitly as an example application for this technology and Microsoft may now have to answer questions in which way this patent applies to its new Skype entity and if the technology will become part of Skype.
Microsoft May Add Eavesdropping To Skype
LONDON -- At the Office 365 launch, Microsoft U.K.'s managing director Gordon Frazer, gave the first admission that cloud data -- regardless of where it is in the world -- is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act. After a year of researching the Patriot Act's breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries , Microsoft was the first cloud provider to openly admit it.
Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data
Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H 's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.
Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write
In our upcoming BlackHat talk , we will show you how the WiFi data stored by Windows can be used to geolocate where your computer has been. While the ability to retrace where a computer has been (and when) certainly carries privacy implications, in this post I want to focus on how we uncovered this data, and the unexpected difficulties we encountered while developing this technique. How can you retrace where a computer has been? While analyzing what computer-specific data is recorded by Windows, we found out that for each access point a computer is connected to, Windows records its MAC address and the last time of connection. The physical location of a MAC address can be found by querying a public geolocation API, such as the Google one.
Using the Microsoft Geolocalization API to retrace where a Windows laptop has been | From Information to Intelligence
Microsoft shutters Wi-Fi data over privacy
Microsoft has ceased publishing the estimated locations of millions of laptops, mobile phones and other devices with Wi-Fi connections around the world, after an article on Friday from ZDNet Australia 's sister site CNET highlighted privacy concerns. The decision to rework Live.com's geolocation service comes after scrutiny of the way that Microsoft made available its database, assembled by both Windows Phone 7 phones and what the company calls "managed driving" by Street View-like vehicles that record Wi-Fi signals accessible from public roads.
caption: Examples of HTC device locations that CNET extracted from Microsoft's Live.com location database. (Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET) Microsoft has collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world and makes them available on the Web without taking the privacy precautions that competitors have, CNET has learned. The vast database available through Live.com publishes the precise geographical location, which can point to a street address and sometimes even a corner of a building, of Android phones , Apple devices, and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets. Unlike Google and Skyhook Wireless, which have compiled similar lists of these unique Wi-Fi addresses, Microsoft has not taken any measures to curb access to its database.
Microsoft's Web map exposes phone, PC locations | Privacy Inc.
