14 DAY TRIAL // A Chinese province recently decided to cancel orders for Windows 8 computers after the central government described the operating system as a “national threat” which contains backdoors that could be used by the US authorities and Microsoft itself to spy on its users and steal state secrets.
While the company has until now remained tight-lipped on the topic and tried to discuss with the Chinese governments on the matters that need to be addressed, Microsoft now decided to release a public statement to set things straight in this whole saga.
In a statement published on the company's Weibo account and spotted by Neowin, Microsoft clearly states that it never worked with any government across the world on any ways to attack its customers or any other institution, pointing out that the Chinese government computers are perfectly fine if they decided to deploy Windows 8.
At the same time, Microsoft explained that no backdoors are part of Windows 8, so the company cannot spy on its users and access locally stored data, while also pointing out that governments or intelligence agencies haven't been helped by the software giant itself to access customer details.
Last but not least, Microsoft emphasized that it does not agree with government requests to share details about its users and is always asking for a court order to do it.
In a statement published today by Brad Smith, general counsel & executive vice president, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft, the company asked the US government to stop any activity that could be regarded as hacking attempts on data centers holding user information.
“We believe our efforts to expand encryption across our services make it much harder for any government to successfully hack data in transit or at rest. Yet more than seven months after the Washington Post first reported that the National Security Agency hacked systems outside the U.S. to access data held by Yahoo! and Google, the Executive Branch remains silent about its views of this practice,” the Microsoft exec explained.
“Shouldn’t a government that prosecutes foreigners who hack into U.S. companies stop its own employees from hacking into such businesses? Why must we continue to wait for an assurance on this issue?”
China decided to ban Windows 8 on government computers last month and recently recommended a local province that planned to purchase systems running this new OS version to cancel the order on security claims. Microsoft, on the other hand, replied that it's still discussing with local authorities on this new decision and pointed out that Windows 7 will instead be offered to country officials until this dispute is resolved.