Microsoft Received Over 35,000 Requests For User Details

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Microsoft Received Over 35,000 Requests For User Details

By Fahad Ali On October 15, 2015

From governments, mostly. And the good news? The number of rejected requests has doubled in the first half of the year, says Microsoft. All revealed in some new transparency reports published by the company.

Redmond has opened up, in recent times, when it comes to user privacy, and as part of this new drive, the software titan revealed the number of requests it received from law enforcement agencies for access to user information

Overall, though, in H1, only small changes have been recorded, compared to the last six months of 2014.

The company received a total of 35,228 requests for customer information from agencies — up from 31,002 requests in the second half of last year.

But the company has confirmed that the number of rejected requests has doubled this time.

Around 12% of the requests were denied for not meeting the legal requirements, meaning the final count increased from 2,342 last year to 4,383 in H2 2016.

Need some more details?

How about the fact that out of all these requests, only 3% were actually seeking content created, shared, or stored on Microsoft servers. What this means is that the company did not hand over private information unless a court order or warrant was provided.

Breaking things down to country level, the United States, the UK, Turkey, France, and Germany accounted for 72.7% of all requests.

There are also some pointers regarding the right to be forgotten requests that Microsoft received in Europe that asked for the company to remove user details from search results. Germany took top spot here, with 759 requests, followed by the United Kingdom with 559.

Redmond says that at least 50% of them have already been removed, including results on Bing, data from Bing Ads, MSN, and content on OneDrive.