Microsoft has a lot of consumer products and services, including Bing, OneDrive, Skype and Xbox Live. Starting August 1, those services and others will be available with updated versions of the company's privacy and service agreements.
In a blog post. Microsoft said the updated policies "do not represent a change in Microsoft's approach to customer privacy" but rather an effort to both simplify their language as well as make them more transparent to users. Here's what the company says are the three basic goals they wanted to put in with these updates.
- Simplicity: These changes bring together a number of previously separate – and often repetitive – documents to make it easier for customers to find and understand the information. Instead of agreeing to separate terms and statements for each service, customers who use more than one Microsoft service will be able to accept once for multiple services and review one privacy statement.
- Transparency: Although we've simplified and consolidated the terms and policies, we didn't want to over-simplify, either. We want to give consumers meaningful information about how we collect and use personal data. Thus, the privacy statement still provides the service-level details our customers need in order to understand the privacy implications of the services they use.
- Privacy: These statements reiterate what we've said in the past: We don't use customer communications to serve targeted ads to customers and we are committed to putting customers in control of their information.
You can go ahead and check out both the updated service agreement, which has a full list of Microsoft's products and services that it will support, as well as the company's new privacy statement now.
Source: Microsoft
