A new report shows that #Microsoft offered the #NSA direct access to #Outlook.com, #Skype, #SkyDrive accounts. Microsoft has denied the accusations – What do you think, is this true? http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Offered-the-NSA-Direct-Access-to-Outlook-com-Skype-SkyDrive-Accounts-Report-367531.shtml. This could be true, this is part of the patriot Act and shows that the United States government does care about terrorism. But they are portraying all honest citizens as criminals. Microsoft has a long collaboration with US intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the FBI. Who knows what they had in Windows `95, and now this? They apparently give access to Skydrive accounts to allow law enforcement agencies warrant-less access to see what a person of interest has been uploading. This is a violation of privacy and should not be tolerated in this day and age. That is why you should use better alternatives. There is Jottacloud, this is a free service that gives you 5 Gigabytes of space and it operates under Norwegian privacy laws and not the US. http://www.jottacloud.com/.
You could give that service a try and see if it is more secure than the Microsoft and Google alternatives. Adrive is another solution that gives you a paid service with a personal basic plan for a low price that offers 50 gigabytes of online cloud storage. See them here: http://www.adrive.com/. Oxygen Cloud is another solution with paid and free plans; this offers a secure private cloud storage solution that is a good alternative for storing files online. Dropbox is also a good way to manage cloud storage. My account only has 2 gigabytes of space, but you can upgrade to more space by referring friends to the service. This is concerning; it makes you wonder what other Microsoft software and operating systems are spying on you. This is the sad truth of living in the post-9/11 world. or you could just write your files onto a DVD and mail that to someone and they would keep the files safe without using online cloud storage. There are simple mathematical equations that show that monitoring all social media and websites are actually making the NSA spynet less effective: http://qz.com/92207/simple-math-shows-why-the-nsas-facebook-spying-is-a-fools-errand/. But there must be a reason for all of this monitoring of the Internet, other than scouring all websites for keywords and phrases and hoping to find a less than intelligent terrorist.