Government of Ireland, European MEP file amicus briefs in New York privacy case

- Brad Smith - General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft

This year one of our priorities has been to advocate for policies that ensure people around the world can trust technology. Keeping this trust is not only important for global technology companies, but vital for ensuring people everywhere can use technology with confidence. One important aspect of ensuring this trust is for likeminded governments to agree on basic principles for sharing data across borders while respecting local privacy laws. The Read more »

Educational leaders discuss student privacy in higher education at D.C. symposium

- Microsoft News Center Staff
education, privacy, Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center

In early December, higher-education policy professionals and academics gathered at the Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center in Washington, D.C. for a half-day symposium on challenges raised by new approaches and emerging data-driven platforms in higher education. The discussion, “Building Privacy into Data-Driven Education,” was part of the @Microsoft series and was held in partnership with the Information Law Institute at NYU. Microsoft’s Senior Policy Counsel Greg McCurdy and NYU Information Law Read more »

Microsoft takes action against tech support scammers

- Courtney Gregoire - Senior Attorney, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit
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Imagine your mother receives a call from a fast-talking “computer technician” and before she knows it, the technician has convinced her that her computer is infected with a virus and for $600, they will “fix” it. This scam happens more often than you might think! Tech support scams are not a new phenomenon. Scammers have been peddling useless security software for years, tricking people into spending millions of dollars on Read more »

#MSFTCOSO POV: UK leads world in fight against online child sexual abuse material

- Jacqueline Beauchere - Chief Online Safety Officer, Microsoft

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron is leading a global charge to stamp out child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, dedicating funding, resources and a personal passion to the effort. Last week in London, the prime minister held the first-ever global summit entitled “#WePROTECT Children Online,” designed to seek coordinated global action, explore technological solutions and create an international network to protect children from online sexual exploitation. The Summit brought together Read more »

Business, Media and Civil Society Speak Up in Key Privacy Case

- Microsoft News Center Staff - Microsoft News Center Staff
Web

Leading technology companies including Verizon, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Salesforce, HP, eBay and AT&T have filed “friend of the court” briefs in Microsoft’s ongoing legal challenge of a U.S. government search warrant for customer data stored in Ireland. “Seldom has a case below the Supreme Court attracted the breadth and depth of legal involvement we’re seeing today,” writes Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel and executive vice president of legal and corporate Read more »

Commemorating International Human Rights Day

- Dan Bross - Senior Director, Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft

On this day – Dec. 10 – 66 years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was approved by the UN General Assembly. To commemorate the day, they proclaimed the first Human Rights Day in 1950 to bring to the attention ‘of the peoples of the world’ the UDHR as the common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. This need to protect and indeed promote human Read more »

What if? Microsoft appeal ponders U.S. reaction to foreign data demand

- Brad Smith - General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft

“Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter’s box Read more »

Embedding human rights: Who leads?

- Michael Wann - Microsoft News Center Staff

The following is a guest post by David Vermijs, an advisor with Shift, a leading non-profit organization that helps governments, businesses and their stakeholders put the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights into practice. Recently the European Union adopted a new Directive that will require approximately 6,000 enterprises across Europe to report on how they are conducting due diligence on human rights and other corporate responsibility issues by Read more »

Microsoft and The Seattle Times continue partnership with discussion on relations with China

- Michael Wann - Microsoft News Center Staff
LiveWire, Brad Smith, China, Seattle Times

Last Thursday, Microsoft hosted the second LiveWire event in partnership with The Seattle Times at its Redmond, Washington campus. Building on the first LiveWire event on early learning programs in Washington state, last week’s discussion was, “A Bridge to China: Exploring the Northwest’s future with the East.” Moderated by The Seattle Times economics columnist, Jon Talton, more than 450 community members came together to hear the panel of speakers including Read more »

Online assessments in the United States

- Cameron Evans - Chief Technology Officer for U.S. Education, Microsoft

Almost everyone remembers taking an exam on paper, filling in your multiple-choice answer selection in the oval bubbles with a No. 2 pencil. Ah, the good old days. Before the widespread availability of personal technology we did most of our learning (and teaching) with the most advanced technologies available – paper and pencil. While definitely tried and true, paper and pencil don’t enable the level of adaptation to the learning Read more »

New poll: Growing concern in Ireland over online data privacy

- Cathriona Hallahan - Managing Director, Microsoft Ireland
privacy, Ireland

Today we released a new poll showing that a large majority of Irish people want strong privacy protections for their online data, and they expect the government to stand up for Irish law when other countries disagree. 87 percent agree their personal information in the cloud deserves the same privacy protections as that stored on paper. 89 percent say a foreign government should not be able to demand personal information Read more »