I understand that there are legal barriers around it per the privacy policy but the fact that someone at Microsoft can just decide that they need file X off my laptop and then fetch it is way beyond the pale. If someone wants the files off my laptop, they can get a search warrant and successfully convince my lawyer that I am legally obliged to decrypt.
There is no evidence that Microsoft currently has the ability to arbitrarily fetch files from your computer.
If your argument is that they could implement such a capability, that's always been true for any OS, including free operating systems, unless you audit the code and compile it yourself.
The issue isn't whether the functionality is currently built-in (it'd be trivial to add later). The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined):
>we may access, disclose and preserve your personal information, including your private content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or ______files in private folders______), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary...
I understand that you'd have to do a full code audit of every application that has permissions to read files off your local disks to ensure this wasn't already being done by someone, but at least as a Linux user, I'm not used to software openly expressing its intent to feed private files off to any like-minded entity that asks for them. Definitely a red flag for me.
> The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined):
The quoted section is from the privacy header which also applies to Onedrive, which is essentially Microsoft's version of Dropbox.
They're not stating their intent to collect files in private folders on your computer aside from bits that have always been collected, like whatever parts of a crash dump Error Reporting sends on.
>It applies to Bing, Cortana, MSN, Office, OneDrive, Outlook.com, Skype, ___Windows___, Xbox and other Microsoft services that display this statement.
It appears that you're making an assumption that they only intend this to apply to OneDrive, but they explicitly state it applies to Windows too. My Linux installation definitely didn't come with such boilerplate.
