Amid widespread privacy concerns in the wake of a leak investigation, Microsoft has announced a change in the way it handles private customer accounts. Under the new policy, effective immediately, any investigation that suggests that Microsoft's services have been used to traffic stolen Microsoft intellectual property will no longer result in Microsoft accessing private account information. Instead, the investigation will be handed over to law enforcement agencies, and it will be for those agencies to demand access to necessary private information.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith also said that the company's terms of service will be updated to reflect this new policy in coming months.

Court documents last week revealed that Microsoft read private Hotmail e-mails of a blogger who received secret information from a disgruntled employee. Microsoft's terms of service, in common with those of Yahoo, Google, and Apple, give the company the legal right to access private information for such investigations. Nonetheless, the lack of transparency and oversight caused widespread alarm.

In the immediate aftermath of the outcry, Redmond announced that in the future, it would seek input from a former judge to determine whether accessing private data was justified and would include the number of such accesses in its periodic transparency reports.

The newly announced policy goes much further: now, any investigation that reveals the use of Microsoft's own services will be held to exactly the same legal and evidential standard as investigations that reveal the use of non-Microsoft services and the same oversight and transparency as Microsoft and others are demanding to be used in government investigations.

This is a solid response from the company and perhaps reflects the way attitudes have changed since the 2012 investigation. The question of access to personal data stored on cloud services has become a major concern in the wake of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks. The old policy may not have been exceptional, but it took an approach that's no longer palatable to many of today's customers.