- Aug 30, 2011
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Is this hypocrisy in light of the Scroogled campaign or justified in light of the situation? Under what kind of circumstances should a corporation be allowed to do things like this without a court order? Even the NSA needs permission from the DOJ to gather info on suspects. Opinions?
Microsoft: We have the right to search your Hotmail account (updated)
EDIT: I guess I need to make a couple of things a little more clear. What I was mainly trying to accomplish with this post was to play devil's advocate and foster an important discussion. Do I personally think Microsoft was justified? For the most part, yes. Richard Hay of Windows Observer wrote a very good and relatively fair take on the situation here: http://www.windowsobserver.com/2014...s-in-their-search-of-leakers-hotmail-account/
But I do think this is still a topic worthy of discussion as I believe it raises another important question regarding privacy - Just because it is in the TOS of the email host, does that alone make it right or legal, even given the circumstances? The reason I bring that up is because consent is given in Goggle's TOS for them to use an algorithm to scan a user's email for keywords in order to target advertising, yet they are still facing a class action suit based on that practice. Thinking about that also led me to this thought - Is it possible that the defense may be able to persuade the court that is prosecuting this case to declare the email evidence inadmissible due to the manner in which it was gathered? My reasoning behind that is the fact that even known criminals who are clearly guilty of misconduct have wiretap evidence and such dismissed all the time based on how it was obtained. In any case, only one thing is absolutely certain at this point in my opinion, and that is that things become dreadfully murky once lawyers become involved.
I think that Microsoft may have perhaps avoided much of this supposed bruhaha had they simply given permission to an outside law enforcement agency to conduct the investigation and gather evidence as the way they went about it might smack a bit of vigilantism in the eyes of privacy advocates. As always, though, hindsight is 20/20.
Microsoft: We have the right to search your Hotmail account (updated)
EDIT: I guess I need to make a couple of things a little more clear. What I was mainly trying to accomplish with this post was to play devil's advocate and foster an important discussion. Do I personally think Microsoft was justified? For the most part, yes. Richard Hay of Windows Observer wrote a very good and relatively fair take on the situation here: http://www.windowsobserver.com/2014...s-in-their-search-of-leakers-hotmail-account/
But I do think this is still a topic worthy of discussion as I believe it raises another important question regarding privacy - Just because it is in the TOS of the email host, does that alone make it right or legal, even given the circumstances? The reason I bring that up is because consent is given in Goggle's TOS for them to use an algorithm to scan a user's email for keywords in order to target advertising, yet they are still facing a class action suit based on that practice. Thinking about that also led me to this thought - Is it possible that the defense may be able to persuade the court that is prosecuting this case to declare the email evidence inadmissible due to the manner in which it was gathered? My reasoning behind that is the fact that even known criminals who are clearly guilty of misconduct have wiretap evidence and such dismissed all the time based on how it was obtained. In any case, only one thing is absolutely certain at this point in my opinion, and that is that things become dreadfully murky once lawyers become involved.
I think that Microsoft may have perhaps avoided much of this supposed bruhaha had they simply given permission to an outside law enforcement agency to conduct the investigation and gather evidence as the way they went about it might smack a bit of vigilantism in the eyes of privacy advocates. As always, though, hindsight is 20/20.
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