A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
Ok, honest question. Are you surprised?
If it was any other company I would be. But it’s Microsoft.
Yes.
I’m no microsoft fanboy, but I am shocked that they would do this. Everyone should be shocked. To be anything but shocked is to be complacent.
This is the kind of shit google does on the regular, Never heard of Microsoft doing anything like this before.
And as I’ve said in response to instances of google doing this, I’ll say it again here. This continues to highlight the dangers of having all your eggs in one companies basket, by choosing comfort and convenience you’ve given your entire digital life over to a company that has no compunctions against metaphorically guillotining it for any reason they want.
I agree. Which is why I don’t use anything Microsoft. Even in software projects I go out of my way to not use a single Microsoft dependency or library.
I self-host my own photo auto-upload with Nextcloud. I don’t use Windows. I’m forced to use MS stuff at my work but I managed to get the company-wide policy changed to allow anyone to use Linux or Mac, so I’m running Ubuntu.
I’ve also been working up the effort to ditch stock Android and go with GrapheneOS.