As for me: MS has discredited itself with this behavior.
How can I know, that MS will not open my Word or Excel documents that I have in the Online-Office system, because it may contain information of value to its business -- or it may infringe on patents MS holds?
So, neither MS online mail products, nor online office systems can be trusted any more! Any business owner should know this and withdraw from usage of any MS owned online systems.
"So, neither MS online mail products, nor online office systems can be trusted any more! Any business owner should know this and withdraw from usage of any MS owned online systems"
FYI: Google and Yahoo have similar policies and similar histories of abuse.
If you feel this way about Microsoft, you should feel this way about Google products, sites and services too.
Completely agreed. Also, I think starting with Windows 8.1, if you're logged in to Windows with a Microsoft account, your documents get saved automatically to Microsoft's cloud. I would watch out for that, especially if you have sensitive documents.
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I am an employee with a big technology company like google and my company has a wide array of partnerships, contracts, and ongoing lawsuits with various microsoft business units. Some court may give a court order to disclose some email from some employees of my company, but Microsoft might just decide to search every hotmail account of every employee of my company for whatever reason they want, and only reveal extremely limited subset as required by specific litigation.
If they could get a court order, why did they not do so?
I am really amused about the law feeling in the US. It seems to me, that in the US it is enough that a big company thinks that it can get a court order -- in that case nothing else is needed -- don't waste the time of the courts just go on.
Why not allow MS to also do the punishment -- don't waste any court-time!
Really cute!
To come to your question: There are cases, where you can get warrants because you infringe patents. So, when MS thinks, that I could infringe one -- why not search my office documents first??
Is this enough example? I would say, there could be thousands ... just imagine a world where the lawyers of the big companies make the court decisions ... <sarcastic>would be OK, they are making the laws anyway!</sarcastic>
So, neither MS online mail products, nor online office systems can be trusted any more!
can you back this up with proper evidence? If I get it correctly, the hotmail EULA sort of allowed to do MS what they did. So does the Online-Office system (is that the same as Skydrive actually?) have a similar EULA? If so, then your statement seems valid. Else you are comparing apples with, erm, something that still comes close to apples: legally MS can't do that - which is no guarantee that they won't. Apart from that, like with probably any cloud service, there is always the risk a thir party like the NSA does whatever they want with your data anyway.
Completely agree. As a convicted monopolist Microsoft at the very least needs this kind of behavior, especially conducting search on its own without any law enforcement order.
How can I know, that MS will not open my Word or Excel documents that I have in the Online-Office system, because it may contain information of value to its business -- or it may infringe on patents MS holds?
So, neither MS online mail products, nor online office systems can be trusted any more! Any business owner should know this and withdraw from usage of any MS owned online systems.