August 22, 2012 | Online

No porn allowed in our cloud, says Microsoft

Microsoft wants to make it perfectly clear that porn will not be tolerated on its SkyDrive cloud service for its new Windows 8 OS and Windows 8 phone. In fact, no nudity will be permitted, including "non-human forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga."

As well, anything that "incites, advocates, or expresses pornography, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, hatred, bigotry, racism, or gratuitous violence,” will violate the Terms of Use.

How Microsoft intends to monitor the personal files of SkyDrive users is not clear, but the company is using the excuse of battling child porn to snoop through your content. It says that  "with 60 million SkyDrive customers in more than 100 countries, Microsoft works hard to keep SkyDrive available around the world as the trusted place for people to store personal data. In order to do this, we’ve built SkyDrive to respect the privacy of our users while also ensuring it is not used for illegal activity such as child pornography." 

In case you think Microsoft isn't serious, think again; the company has warned that failure to comply could see you permanently banned from using the cloud, and may include the loss of your Outlook email account or MS Office and XBox 360 software. 

Restricting content in the cloud, which allows you to access your files and apps over a network instead of from your hard drive, is nothing new. Other service providers have restrictions. For example, Google will not permit users to share porn, and DropBox permits it, as long as it's not pirated. But by going into the cloud, you may easily be giving Microsoft permission to sift through content you thought was private. 

No Porn Allowed on Microsoft's SkyDrive Cloud [XBiz]