Brad Smith, General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs for Microsoft, writes on their blog:
Today, we are releasing our 2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report.This is our first Law Enforcement Requests Report. It provides data on the number of requests we received from law enforcement agencies around the world relating to Microsoft online and cloud services and how we responded to those requests. All of our major online services are covered in this report, including, for example, Hotmail, Outlook.com; SkyDrive; Xbox LIVE; Microsoft Account; and Office 365. We’re also making available similar data relating to Skype, which Microsoft acquired in October 2011.
We will update this report every six months.
One of the most surprising finds, perhaps was how relatively few requests resulted in disclosure of content:
First, while we receive a significant number of law enforcement requests from around the world, very few actually result in the disclosure to these agencies of customer content. To be precise, last year Microsoft (including Skype) received 75,378 law enforcement requests for customer information, and these requests potentially affected 137,424 accounts or other identifiers. Only 2.1 percent, or 1,558 requests, resulted in the disclosure of customer content.
Read more on Microsoft on the Issues.