blog1: Important – new Microsoft Services Agreement & Privacy Statement for Skype

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Important – new Microsoft Services Agreement & Privacy Statement for Skype

When Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011, we brought together our communication technologies to help you stay closer to friends, family and colleagues. And, if you're like millions of other people who use a number of Microsoft's services (for example, Outlook.com for email, Bing, Xbox, Office 365, etc.) we're making life a little easier for everyone. How? Well, most of Microsoft's consumer services are being brought together under a single Microsoft Services Agreement and a consolidated Microsoft Privacy Statement.

We'll be moving from Skype's current Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to the new Microsoft Services Agreement and the Microsoft Privacy Statement on August 1, 2015.

Do you need to do anything? These are important documents and we encourage you to read them by navigating to the links at the bottom of this email. By continuing to use Skype after August 1, 2015, you agree to these updated terms. Should you disagree, simply discontinue using Skype or cancel your subscription before then. If you are a parent or guardian, you are responsible for your child's or teenager's use of Skype, including purchases.

Here are the highlights:

Simplicity
Many of our customers use more than one Microsoft service, and have agreed to a number of terms and privacy policies. To make it easier to use multiple services, we've brought together these documents into a single services agreement and a consolidated privacy statement that cover most of our consumer services.

Privacy
Our longstanding commitment to privacy has not changed. We remain dedicated to protecting your data, being clear about how we use it, and putting you in control. For example, we do not use the contents of your email, chat, video calls, documents, photos, or voice messages to target advertising to you. And as you'll see when you read the privacy statement, we offer a range of tools that enable you to make decisions about what data we collect. Additionally, we have launched a new privacy dashboard that makes it easier for you to make choices about how we use your data.

Transparency
We're using straightforward language so our terms of use and privacy statement are easier to understand. In addition, we've put key privacy information all in one place, so you no longer have to jump between several documents to understand the big picture. While this consolidation eliminates redundancies and simplifies the structure of the information, we continue to provide service-specific details to allow you to make informed choices about how you use our services. We've also added some additional privacy information about new features and functionality we'll soon roll out, like those you'll see on Windows 10.