Microsoft Content Policy
Discussion
I did think about making up a throwaway account to post this, but I have absolutely nothing to hide so here goes nothing...
I’ve had a Microsoft email account for decades, Xbox live since launch and more recently I’ve had various 365 subscriptions.
I’ve also got various Microsoft devices like a Series X, Surface Pro 4 and other Win 10 devices.
I have a fair amount of my cash invested in my Xbox as nearly all my contents are digital downloads.
Last week I decided to move away from Dropbox and put around 250GB’s of photo’s into my OneDrive account, you get 1TB included in 365, Dropbox was costing me around £20 a month so it seemed a no brainer.
All goes well, 3 days later and everything is uploaded and synced between devices, I have a synced copy of all content on my desktop.
So this morning I switch on my Xbox for a quick blast of CoD but got an error when trying to sign in, so I followed the instructions and went online only to be told the below -
[b]Your account has been locked
We’ve detected some activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement and have locked your account.[/b]
So I followed a link where I could fill in a ‘locked account review form’.
A few hours later I get a scripted reply saying -
[b]Microsoft disabled access to the account due to a serious violation of the Microsoft Services Agreement: https://www.microsoft.com/servicesagreement/defaul...
As stated in the Microsoft Services Agreement, you will no longer be able to access any Services that require a Microsoft account.
For any subscriptions associated with the account, Microsoft will immediately cease charging the credit card on file for recurring charges.[/b]
I’ve been racking my brains as to what I could have done, assuming it was an Xbox issue, maybe someone taking issue with me throwing out a few f
ks here and there. But I don’t trash talk or use racial/inflammatory language etc.
I’ve had a good Google and finally found a German website where a few people had the exact same issue, a total blanket ban on all MS services. They believe the issue is because amongst their photo uploads were pictures of their children in various states of undress and this then made me think about what I too had uploaded.
So amongst 100000’s of family photo’s there were a handful of my kids messing about naked in the bath, absolutely my children, in my home, stored in my private OneDrive account.
I don’t know what is repulsing me more, the thought of somebody at MS peering through my private photo collection or me being accused of uploading sexual images of kids from behind a corporate morality curtain?
Quite frankly MS can go shove their account up their backsides, there are plenty of other cloud storage providers out there.
But I’ve also invested heavily in my Xbox content, I don’t want to lose my various digital download games, films and cloud saves.
I’ve appealed three times today and I believe I’ve now hit a brick wall, I’ll try one more last ditch effort and tweet the UK MS directors and see if I can a response from somebody in their executive office.
TLDR, keep your valuable family photo’s on a few usb sticks?
I’ve had a Microsoft email account for decades, Xbox live since launch and more recently I’ve had various 365 subscriptions.
I’ve also got various Microsoft devices like a Series X, Surface Pro 4 and other Win 10 devices.
I have a fair amount of my cash invested in my Xbox as nearly all my contents are digital downloads.
Last week I decided to move away from Dropbox and put around 250GB’s of photo’s into my OneDrive account, you get 1TB included in 365, Dropbox was costing me around £20 a month so it seemed a no brainer.
All goes well, 3 days later and everything is uploaded and synced between devices, I have a synced copy of all content on my desktop.
So this morning I switch on my Xbox for a quick blast of CoD but got an error when trying to sign in, so I followed the instructions and went online only to be told the below -
[b]Your account has been locked
We’ve detected some activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement and have locked your account.[/b]
So I followed a link where I could fill in a ‘locked account review form’.
A few hours later I get a scripted reply saying -
[b]Microsoft disabled access to the account due to a serious violation of the Microsoft Services Agreement: https://www.microsoft.com/servicesagreement/defaul...
As stated in the Microsoft Services Agreement, you will no longer be able to access any Services that require a Microsoft account.
For any subscriptions associated with the account, Microsoft will immediately cease charging the credit card on file for recurring charges.[/b]
I’ve been racking my brains as to what I could have done, assuming it was an Xbox issue, maybe someone taking issue with me throwing out a few f
ks here and there. But I don’t trash talk or use racial/inflammatory language etc.I’ve had a good Google and finally found a German website where a few people had the exact same issue, a total blanket ban on all MS services. They believe the issue is because amongst their photo uploads were pictures of their children in various states of undress and this then made me think about what I too had uploaded.
So amongst 100000’s of family photo’s there were a handful of my kids messing about naked in the bath, absolutely my children, in my home, stored in my private OneDrive account.
I don’t know what is repulsing me more, the thought of somebody at MS peering through my private photo collection or me being accused of uploading sexual images of kids from behind a corporate morality curtain?
Quite frankly MS can go shove their account up their backsides, there are plenty of other cloud storage providers out there.
But I’ve also invested heavily in my Xbox content, I don’t want to lose my various digital download games, films and cloud saves.
I’ve appealed three times today and I believe I’ve now hit a brick wall, I’ll try one more last ditch effort and tweet the UK MS directors and see if I can a response from somebody in their executive office.
TLDR, keep your valuable family photo’s on a few usb sticks?
Insert Coin said:
Quite frankly MS can go shove their account up their backsides, there are plenty of other cloud storage providers out there.
It's not just Microsoft, but google, facebook, amazon, ebay and everyone else. They have rigid policies often implemented vis automated algorithms , then "computer says no" appeal processes with "we can'r tell you anything for security reasons" blank wall responses.Consider yourself lucky that you are a personal customer and not business. Small companies and individuals can literally lose their livelihoods overnight e.g. a developer of an app on google play gets banned for some reason, so all his sales are gone. His work email is blocked and since it is linked to his personal account, that gets blocked too.
I was once blocked temporarily on Ebay for reasons they refused to divulge, and as I once used a partners paypal years prior to this date, as bid on something on her behalf, they automatically randomly blocked her too. Madness.
We are at a stage where governments should be insisting on Ombudsmans with the teeth to appropriately penalize the company if they find them to be negligent. As you say, it was a no brainer die to the pricing, but as you also know, you get what you pay for..
For my emails I use a custom domain name which is registered via a different provider, so if gmail or MS decide to suddenly block me one day, I can switch it over to someone else, as opposed to losing the email address itself if it was @googlemail.com or @outlook.com.
Edited by hyphen on Saturday 17th April 21:51
Oh I agree, I do have a fair amount of personal documents stashed in OneDrive too, I can’t imagine what would have happened if my content was online only.
This has totally made me reassess my thoughts on cloud back-up, especially as I’ve been banging on for years about using a good quality back-up provider such as MS.
I don’t write bomb making instructions or support radical political groups and I wasn’t naive enough to think my content was entirely private, but I didn’t think a few pictures of my boy’s pecker in the bath would self-destruct my 20 year old Microsoft account.
This has totally made me reassess my thoughts on cloud back-up, especially as I’ve been banging on for years about using a good quality back-up provider such as MS.
I don’t write bomb making instructions or support radical political groups and I wasn’t naive enough to think my content was entirely private, but I didn’t think a few pictures of my boy’s pecker in the bath would self-destruct my 20 year old Microsoft account.
Thing is MS and other providers can’t take the risk. It may be that you are perfectly innocent but they are constantly being accused by various groups of not doing enough to prevent child exploitation. A zero tolerance policy is the only thing that is workable from their perspective.
I take it you understand these photos are automatically detected by algorithms designed to spot actual child porn. No one at MS is looking at your photos.
Its no consolation to you but the people they catch far outway the false positives.
If you are getting no where, I would get a lawyer letter to raise the issue with their legal department. Although I'm not sure how you would prove it was genuinely innocent. All I can think is you would need to retake the photo from the same angle with a newspaper and your passport in the shot.
But there must be loads of parents with photos of their kids in the bath on Apple photos and Google photos. I guess in future try not to take naked photos of your kids. Yeah its funny when they are 21 to look back but these days its too close to the mark from the eye of a 3rd party and is difficult to prove one way or the other even though you know the proof.
Its no consolation to you but the people they catch far outway the false positives.
If you are getting no where, I would get a lawyer letter to raise the issue with their legal department. Although I'm not sure how you would prove it was genuinely innocent. All I can think is you would need to retake the photo from the same angle with a newspaper and your passport in the shot.
But there must be loads of parents with photos of their kids in the bath on Apple photos and Google photos. I guess in future try not to take naked photos of your kids. Yeah its funny when they are 21 to look back but these days its too close to the mark from the eye of a 3rd party and is difficult to prove one way or the other even though you know the proof.
plasticpig said:
Thing is MS and other providers can’t take the risk. It may be that you are perfectly innocent but they are constantly being accused by various groups of not doing enough to prevent child exploitation. A zero tolerance policy is the only thing that is workable from their perspective.
I’d get that if there were more than a handful in my account.The_Jackal said:
I take it you understand these photos are automatically detected by algorithms designed to spot actual child porn. No one at MS is looking at your photos.
Its no consolation to you but the people they catch far outway the false positives.
If you are getting no where, I would get a lawyer letter to raise the issue with their legal department. Although I'm not sure how you would prove it was genuinely innocent. All I can think is you would need to retake the photo from the same angle with a newspaper and your passport in the shot.
But there must be loads of parents with photos of their kids in the bath on Apple photos and Google photos. I guess in future try not to take naked photos of your kids. Yeah its funny when they are 21 to look back but these days its too close to the mark from the eye of a 3rd party and is difficult to prove one way or the other even though you know the proof.
Yes, of course I expect my photos to be scanned by software, but when there’s a hit I’d expect some kind of human interaction where common sense is used.Its no consolation to you but the people they catch far outway the false positives.
If you are getting no where, I would get a lawyer letter to raise the issue with their legal department. Although I'm not sure how you would prove it was genuinely innocent. All I can think is you would need to retake the photo from the same angle with a newspaper and your passport in the shot.
But there must be loads of parents with photos of their kids in the bath on Apple photos and Google photos. I guess in future try not to take naked photos of your kids. Yeah its funny when they are 21 to look back but these days its too close to the mark from the eye of a 3rd party and is difficult to prove one way or the other even though you know the proof.
We aren’t the kind of people who take nude pictures of our kids and upload them to play them back 20 years later. We looked last night and there are less than 5 of them in the bath, nothing directly shown, just wieners in the background kind of thing.
I could be barking up the wrong tree here, maybe they’ve seen something else, but things like my WhatsApp doesn’t have auto upload on and my mates are past the age of sending out pictures of donkeys and scantily clad women.
I applaud them for taking such a strong stance on child pornography, but collateral damage to long standing subscription paying customers without any opportunity to discuss what has happened seems crazy.
Pretty sure MS aren’t going to fold so I’ll need to make a start detaching myself away from them after all these years. Once I have all my data there’s a link they’ve sent me where I can get all my cloud data nuked.
Sledge and peanut spring to mind.
Insert Coin said:
I could be barking up the wrong tree here,
I hope you are, because surely everyone with kids / grandchildren since digital camera and camera-phones came into popular use is going to have pictures of their kids in the bath or paddling pool?There’s a Microsoft forum thread about account suspension- I only glanced at it but it seems to mostly be about suspected terrorist related activity / pictures.
I’ve done some Googling and have directly tweeted most of the U.K executive team, hoping to try and pique some interest in how binary their detection techniques are.
I don’t belong to any terrorist organisations, radical right wing nutters or anything of that sort.
I have backups of everything locally, it’s my Xbox content that bothers me most
It took me 15 minutes yesterday to create a new Hotmail account, new Family 365 subscription etc all using the same name, address and credit card details, so MS can’t hate me that much.
Annoyingly we all use the Office apps and Teams, so there’s no real alternative to them.
Changing my Hotmail address after 20 years means there’s a lot of website details that are going to need updating with my new address, it’s going to be a real pain.
I don’t belong to any terrorist organisations, radical right wing nutters or anything of that sort.
I have backups of everything locally, it’s my Xbox content that bothers me most
It took me 15 minutes yesterday to create a new Hotmail account, new Family 365 subscription etc all using the same name, address and credit card details, so MS can’t hate me that much.
Annoyingly we all use the Office apps and Teams, so there’s no real alternative to them.
Changing my Hotmail address after 20 years means there’s a lot of website details that are going to need updating with my new address, it’s going to be a real pain.
The guilty before you're proven innocent thing over photos of your kids goes back further than easy access to the Internet - can anyone remember the name of the BBC reporter who was charged with child porn because a photo processor (think it was at Boots) on checking the resultant shots saw pictures she had taken of her young kids in the bath? Made the national news and took her months to clear up her name.
In the more modern age a Danish friend of mine had his side business destroyed by the assumption of guilt when it comes to child porn. He had been hosting websites on his own servers since the late 1990s. I can't remember why (I think he had upset someone some where) but he was accused of hosting child porn by another country's law enforcement agency(think it was Germany). Despite his claims of innocence and willingness to let the Danish police on to his servers, the hardware was confiscated and he was charged (though not arrested). Took over six months before someone took a forensic look at his servers and found he was innocent after all, after which the hardware was returned and the charges dropped. He received no apology, no compensation, no indication if his accuser had been charged, and in the meantime his hosting business had collapsed.
In the more modern age a Danish friend of mine had his side business destroyed by the assumption of guilt when it comes to child porn. He had been hosting websites on his own servers since the late 1990s. I can't remember why (I think he had upset someone some where) but he was accused of hosting child porn by another country's law enforcement agency(think it was Germany). Despite his claims of innocence and willingness to let the Danish police on to his servers, the hardware was confiscated and he was charged (though not arrested). Took over six months before someone took a forensic look at his servers and found he was innocent after all, after which the hardware was returned and the charges dropped. He received no apology, no compensation, no indication if his accuser had been charged, and in the meantime his hosting business had collapsed.
dapprman said:
T
can anyone remember the name of the BBC reporter who was charged with child porn because a photo processor (think it was at Boots) on checking the resultant shots saw pictures she had taken of her young kids in the bath? Made the national news and took her months to clear up her name.
.
julia Somervillecan anyone remember the name of the BBC reporter who was charged with child porn because a photo processor (think it was at Boots) on checking the resultant shots saw pictures she had taken of her young kids in the bath? Made the national news and took her months to clear up her name.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Somerville#All...
Well I’ve ‘reached out’ to Cindy Rose via LinkedIn, hoping to get someone from the exec office to look into it for me.
Going back to taking photo’s of your own naked kids, we’ve always made a point of not doing this, also pictures where kids are covered in a face full of chocolate or kids playing with dog food etc.
Going back to taking photo’s of your own naked kids, we’ve always made a point of not doing this, also pictures where kids are covered in a face full of chocolate or kids playing with dog food etc.
Unfortunately with billions of files uploaded an hour, the only way to check and catch stuff is by algorithms.
There is probably minimal human interaction in any of it.
Sadly, it is the flip side of having the whole world connected easily and having powerful computers in their pockets.
Id be surprised if they deal with any cases personally.
The exec you emailed probably has 1000s of identical emails every day.
There is probably minimal human interaction in any of it.
Sadly, it is the flip side of having the whole world connected easily and having powerful computers in their pockets.
Id be surprised if they deal with any cases personally.
The exec you emailed probably has 1000s of identical emails every day.
Yeah no doubt 1000’s of complaints and nobody actually looking at anything in detail to be able to eliminate false positives.
I believe my subscriptions are with Microsoft Operations Ireland Ltd, so next step is to write a signed-for letter to them and head office at Reading.
19 years of loyalty rewarded with a blanket ban for absolutely no reason, I thought Virgin and BT were bad, at least they are regulated in some way.
I believe my subscriptions are with Microsoft Operations Ireland Ltd, so next step is to write a signed-for letter to them and head office at Reading.
19 years of loyalty rewarded with a blanket ban for absolutely no reason, I thought Virgin and BT were bad, at least they are regulated in some way.
randlemarcus said:
It's not a false positive though is it? Intent is not part of the description of a photograph. You uploaded picture of naked children to their service, despite decades of tabloid stories of similar.
I’m only surmising that a few pictures of my kids naked may be the reason, I don’t know that for a fact because nobody is telling me what part of the MSA I have breached.And please don’t make it sound like I intentionally put naked pictures of children routinely onto my OneDrive, either offer assistance or find another thread to play devils advocate on.
extraT said:
Can’t help with the MS issue? But get a Western Digital my loud home. Auto back up on WiFi and available across all major devices (not gaming devices) but things like your phone and laptop.
Yep agree, back it up yourself, goes against all my thinking but I’m now inclined to agree.I used to hate it when tin foil pedants like the above would say something like ‘you’re only backing up onto someone else’s computer’
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