Yet another privacy storm for a technology giant. This time it's up to Microsoft, which has admitted to having hacked into a blogger's Hotmail inbox while carrying out an internal investigation.
The company said it read the blogger's emails to identify an employee suspected of an information leak.
What happened emerged this week as part of a lawsuit against a former Microsoft employee, Alex Kibalko, a Russian employed by the group's Lebanese offices.
In 2012, Microsoft was warned that a blogger, whose identity was kept anonymous in court documents, would receive classified information about the Windows 8 operating system, which had not yet been released to the market at the time.
The blogger then posted images of the new operating system on his website.
To understand the source of the leak, Microsoft launched an investigation and began searching the blogger's accounts to find the name of the perpetrator.
The search was technically legal, according to the company's terms of service which state that the company can access information contained in accounts, including email, chat, forums and other communication tools.
However, the revelations of these investigations have once again opened the debate on the violation of privacy by the web giants.
A move that embarrasses Microsoft, which has always criticized Google for automatically scanning emails for advertising purposes.
