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Classic MS bait and switch move. If you advertise something as unlimited, don't cry if someone uses it as is.

Also they just admitted they know exactly what people store in their cloud (type, content).



Thanks, you're right. I missed that from the announcement - but yes, they just said they can and do check exactly what is uploaded to each account in complete detail. Ouch. I wouldn't touch this for free.


How would they not know? I mean, OneDrive has a built-in video player, it is integrated with Office Online, etc. Obviously Google or Apple knows this as well.

[ from the sibling post ] > they just said they can and do check exactly what is uploaded to each account in complete detail

They have to check because at least they show the proper file type on the online interface :) How would you implement photo and video sharing without looking at the actual files?


You're confusing computer programs with Microsoft employees.


I'm not sure. You can easily get anonymized statistics about your whole userbase without any employee looking at a particular account directly. Getting max(size) of all the storage accounts does not require employees to look at files directly. Figuring out that someone stores 75 TB of video files does not require at all that an employee looks at a specific account.

Really, I don't want to be too snarky but this has nothing to do with privacy at all. At least try to imagine how could you do this without breaching the privacy of individual users if you were running a service like Google Drive or OneDrive -- I'm sure you will find an easy way. :) Do you really think someone actually looked at the account and added up the sizes of the video files in Excel, then wrote to his manager that 'x@hotmail.com has uploaded the whole Game of Thrones in 4K?'


Figuring out that someone stores 75 TB of video files does not require at all that an employee looks at a specific account.

Figuring out that someone stores 75TB of video files does not. Figuring out that

a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings

does.


Not if the users used standard file extensions:

Run a report that selects the top 0.01% of users by total storage used, return % of space per file extension.


Not to mention simply searching for common file names would do the trick, too. It is not too hard to come up with an algorithm that can return a boolean (or float) indicating if a file collection looks like TV series. "Game of Thrones - S??E??" is a good start.


I consider the file names on my hard drive private.


Then you should explicitly use a product that encrypts before upload. Again, it's not clear that a human at MS looked at anything. They could simply have run a query "does any customer have files looking like TV series".




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