Microsoft has revealed it was made to grant over a thousand requests for personal information from the Australian government in the first half of this year alone.

The global computer giant has released a transparency report to try to detail the restraints it is required to adhere to, because of security arrangements with the United States’ NSA. The NSA in turn has a sharing agreement with Australian security forces through the PRISM network of global digital intelligence-gathering.

Microsoft says the various departments within the Australian Government made 1219 requests for access to data. Around 1,050 (86%) of requests were granted, which could include personal information such as email addresses, names, locations and IP addresses

Microsoft went to great lengths to point out that it does not disclose user-generated “content data”, which includes emails, documents and photographs.

Among the 129 Australian requests; six did not meet legal requirements and were rejected, while in 163 cases Microsoft was unable to find the data.

“Unfortunately, we are not currently permitted to report detailed information about the type and volume of any national security orders (e.g. FISA Orders and FISA Directives) that we may receive, so any national security orders we may receive are not included in this report”, Microsoft said on its research page.

“We have summarized, per government direction, the aggregate volume of National Security Letters we have received.”

Transparency reports have become popular for many major companies embroiled in spying speculation. Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo! have all released documents detailing the conditions that government intelligence groups force them to uphold. Dropbox and LinkedIn are both involved in court action in the US over their right to publish data related to NSA requests in more detail.

Microsoft’s transparency report is available here.