As I’ve written about in the past, one of the things we are very focused on at Microsoft is making sure people have a great experience across all of our apps and services. Whether it’s providing one easy place to store all of your favorite stuff online or making it as easy as possible for you to stay in touch with family and friends, we want to deliver a complete experience that focuses on the things people value most.
Part of that is also making sure our service agreements are as easy as possible for everyone to understand. In that vein, I am sharing a few updates coming to the Microsoft Services Agreement (MSA) well in advance of when they take effect, so that the people who use some of our most popular services, including OneDrive, Outlook.com, Bing and MSN.com, know what to anticipate and understand what the updates mean.
To summarize exactly what we’ve changed:
1. Privacy: We are now explicitly stating what we’ve said in past, that we don’t use people’s documents, photos or other personal files or what they say in email, chat, video calls or voice mail to target advertising to them.
2. Transparency: We’ve condensed separate Code of Conduct and Anti-Spam documents into a single list of activities that can result in a customer’s account being closed, and added language about parents’ responsibility for children using Microsoft account and services.
3. Simplicity: We tailor our privacy statements for each product and organize content for consistency, so people can easily find it. This includes a new Windows Services Privacy Statement that covers Microsoft account, Outlook.com and OneDrive.
Customers who have a Microsoft account will also get an email about these updates, and it will be called out on sites including Bing, MSN.com and others before these changes take effect July 31. We’ve also developed an FAQ, to answer the most common questions.
We hope you agree that these updates are good for our customers, and that you continue using the products we work every day to make exceptional. Last but not least, thank you for being a Microsoft customer!