What does Microsoft do with my contacts list?

Hi again,

Any app developer can add OneDrive functionality, which may require access to the contacts for legitimate reasons. It's not always about data mining.

There is a consent screen during the setup, but no subsequent alerts, so I suggest plow through the consent management of apps, starting from:

https://account.microsoft.com/privacy

The 'Edit' option for the apps on https://account.live.com/consent/Manage cannot edit individual permissions (yet?), it's all or nothing.

Microsoft has updated the privacy policy and the terms of use during 2015:

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=521839 - privacy and cookies

and

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=530144 - terms of use

Select 'Expand all' at the top, or select 'More...' for each item to get the full story. 

Both are worth reading, there are significant changes.

--

Hans

What the heck!  After the business with what I first was worried about we see another Microsoft "partner" wants to do exactly the same thing!!?

I don't think I understand this.

Microsoft must have asked, or forced, Catalysis to stop doing what they were doing, BUT they didn't ask all such companies to stop!!!?

Now what kind of sneaky business is that?

I have to be honest that right now after reading your post, druellan, I am not quite sure how to proceed.  Have you done anything special, other than posting here?  And opting out of their service?

And to anyone who will fault my research notes and my memory, I don't at this time remember if we had other folks post that other companies were doing the same thing, asking for access to your contacts list.  I had sort of thought this affair was kind of over.  That Microsoft saw the error of their ways and had changed a policy.

Clearly I was way, way wrong.

And, yes, I completely understand the idea that this is done by all sorts of companies and it's no big deal and all that stuff -- oh, and that data doesn't actually have our name on it -- -- MAYBE -- -- BUT my problem all along has been the folks on my contact list.  If I say 'yes' to some company accessing it, shouldn't I be polite and tell everyone on the lsit?  Or maybe I should ask them first, right?

I mean, the boundaries seem to be shifting way off in the wrong direction.

50 years ago, if some company stated in a contract that they would not install some special phone equipment in my home until I gave them a list of my regular callers' phone numbers, what sort of outcry do you folks think there would have been?

But these days, the outcry is kind of a whisper on the Net.  We're giving folks/companies access to our contacts lists right and left and not a whimper.  Well, some folks are complaining, but they get labelled as "troublemakers" and "big mouth types" and so we are / I am.  Our rights on the Net are getting trampled.  In fact, some folks think we never had any Net Rights.  Hogwash.  But you don't get rights so easliy, it seems.  We were born with certain rights our forefolks fought for us to have, so maybe we better fight for some Net Rights our kids can have.

And this business of sneaking a peek at our contacts list isn't so cool and might even fit in as a violation of some right.  But which one?  No Peeking At My List Of Friends Right?

Agree that all this thread is very interesting.

I was trying to login to a Bitdefender account using my Microsoft account, and this is the message I get:


I'm not sure how this is segmented in the API, but I'm not happy to see that my "contact list" is part of the info I provide when I give access to my profile information. It is also not clear what kind of information is shared as part of "contacts and friends", and because of that, my feeling is that while I'm voluntary exposing my information to a third party, I'm also exposing others, which is troubling.

In the end, I decided not to use the service.

This was a very interesting thread to read through. Very interesting indeed. I was thinking of the same wondering why all that info is needed.

So from this thread and their site it seems Catalysis made it an app instead of just an email address query, because they want to form a complete demographics dataset of us who signed up:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Etc
• How many of our contacts have also signed up; all the info coming from that side like creating groups based on our details (for example people aged 18-24, living in San Francisco tend to click links more, from those who signed up)
• Clicks from email, tracking them + opening the email, link tracking (sign in at any time)

Of course I'm just speculating here, but that's what the requested information points at. When they removed the need for contacts, I guess getting less group etc. related info for the statistics was deemed less important than a possible PR nightmare.

Thank you all for the information in these posts. Now I can tell myself it's safe to continue using OneDrive Preview.