14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is one of the companies that fight for user privacy, but this doesn't necessarily mean that you can upload any kind of content into your OneDrive account.
The company has recently reported a software engineer living in Bristol, UK after finding a total of 25,700 child sex abuse photos in his account. According to a report by BristolPost, Perry Leo, 54 and father of three, pleaded guilty and received a sentence of 18-month suspended prison plus 150 hours of unpaid work.
But the story is a little bit more complicated, and for some reason, Leo actually managed to get away with a sentence that can hardly be called harsh.
Automatic photo scanning
According to the same source, the photos stored in the account showed girls aged 8 to 14 that were being raped or sexually abused. A total of 46 photos were flagged by Microsoft as part of the worst abuse category, such as rape, while 25,000 images were just marked as indecent.
Before blaming Microsoft for looking into your account, it's worth mentioning that the company doesn't manually check the files you store in the cloud, but has scripts that automatically scan images and search for content that might break the law.
Basically, child abuse material can be easily flagged as illegal, so it's not really that hard to find someone who stores such content in his cloud account. Microsoft says that it managed to detect Perry Leo when he tried to move from one computer to another, so he most likely backed his photo collection in the cloud before eventually downloading it back to the new PC.
The judge explained that these images haven't been shared with anyone else online and that's why the 54-year-old doesn't need to be sent to prison. He will, however, be banned from unchecked Internet use and working with people aged under 18 without supervision.