Andrew Nicol is an attorney based in New York City. He was previously a corporate associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and now runs Clickwrapped, an online report that reviews and scores leading consumer websites according to how well they respect the rights of their users. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School. You can follow him on Twitter at @aknicol.
Last night, Microsoft began notifying the users of its online services (including Bing, Hotmail, MSN and Office.com) about
changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement. A cursory glance at the announcement email might make it seem like all that’s happened is some innocent redrafting — Microsoft says that they’ve “modified the agreement to make it easier to read and understand” by introducing a “question and answer format”. But take care. There are two key changes — and they are both bad for users.