Microsoft comes out fighting versus NSA privacy fears

Vendor promises non-US customers a choice of data server location

Microsoft's legal team has revealed a plan to allow customers outside the US to have their personal data stored elsewhere too.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Redmond has become one of the first OEMs to offer greater protection to customers in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

Microsoft UK was contacted by ChannelWeb and confirmed that it is working to reinforce its legal protections for customers, as flagged by Microsoft on its blog.

Brad Smith, general counsel and executive vice president of legal and corporate affairs at Microsoft, says that the vendor aims to use take steps to use the law to ensure that governments don't simply break in and access customer data by brute force.

"Many of our customers have serious concerns about government surveillance of the internet. We share their concerns," Smith wrote in a blog post.

"We are expanding encryption across our services. We are reinforcing legal protections for our customers' data. We are enhancing the transparency of our software code, making it easier for customers to reassure themselves that our products do not contain back doors."

Even in its cloud products, platforms and services, customer content moving between customers and Microsoft will be encrypted by default by the end of 2014, for example.

"And we'll assert available jurisdictional objections to legal demands when governments seek this type of customer content that is stored in another country," Smith wrote.

"Except in the most limited circumstances, we believe that government agencies can go directly to business customers or government customers for information or data about one of their employees - just as they did before these customers moved to the cloud - without undermining their investigation or national security."

According to the FT article, customers should be able to find out whether their data is being subject to laws and access of other countries and decide where their data resides. This appears to parallel certain clauses in the pending European Union data protection revisions.

Microsoft, alongside AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yahoo, wrote to US president Barack Obama in December, supporting the call for reform of government survaillance.

"The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favour of the state and away from the rights of the individual," they wrote in an open letter.

"We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight."

Microsoft UK could not offer more information on the new protections at the time of writing.