Updating our Microsoft Services Agreement

Across the company, we are working to better organize and simplify complex documents, many of these changes having benefited Volume Licensing customers - such as the Enterprise Agreement that was simplified last year and updated to include online services, the recently refreshed PUR that emphasizes plain English, and recent changes to Windows 8 licensing under Software Assurance.

In this vein, we’re also updating the “Microsoft Services Agreement.” This agreement applies to many of our consumer online services such as Outlook, SkyDrive, Messenger, Hotmail, Bing and more. You can see the updated agreement here.

We’re doing this to accomplish a few things that we think are really important:

We want to make sure people know that we prioritize privacy. While we may use content for improving our products (things like making our spell checker better and knowing what features people use so we can focus our efforts there), we use carefully considered safeguards to remove personally identifiable information and to protect your privacy. And we don’t use the contents of your email or your SkyDrive docs for advertising purposes.
We want to be clear that your content is your content. For example, we make the crisp statement that “we do not claim ownership of the content you provide on the services.”
We want to make it easier for people to read the agreement – with plain and straight-forward language – and to make it consistent with other Microsoft agreements.

We’ll keep working to clearly communicate our principles and focus on simply providing the best products in the world. Thanks for your use of Microsoft products.