What makes me the most suspicious of it is the content policy they have in place and I've been told they're actually enforcing. Basically it says you can't have certain things in skydrive, otherwise they'll terminate all the services connected to your Microsoft account. It's not that hard to imagine a scenario where this could be a problem. Say you have image auto-upload on on your Lumia, and in a party some drunken fellow decides to take a picture of his naughty bits. Off goes your MS account and all the services and data with it?
You can very well have the same issue with Google. There are folks who have had their Google account shut down for some innocuous issue with Gmail, G+. It hasn't necessarily lead to an exodus from Google.
I think the reference[1] is to the person who got all his MS access suspended (including XBOX Live and other unrelated stuff) because he had some deemed illegal (by MS) pictures in his private storage. What Google examples are there of that? Google also cuts off ONLY the service you are supposedly abusing; if you abuse adsense, you cannot use adsense anymore, you CAN use adwords, gmail and others with the same account. MS seems to cut off complete access to everything.
Disclaimer: this is what I read in previous HN post; I did not try (and will not try) Skydrive until fully debunked. I have no mercy, interest or would ever use services that automatically cut off multiple services for something I do with my private storage. If I cannot post photos of my kids playing naked in a pool in our garden on my private storage then what is that private storage for exactly? Showing those scary American family portraits (example: http://iso-100.com/images/photos/SlacumFamilyPortrait.jpg) and that's it?
Yes, this was the incident I was referring to. Pardon for omitting the source reference.
EDIT: And yes, I'm aware that Google and probably all the other providers as well do this with the publicly shared pictures. But they should have no business monitoring privately stored data. Maybe hash checking for known illegal files (CP and similar) could be an exception.
Where does it stop though? Checking for known child pornography is of course a very valid reason and the law enforcement agencies have hashes for a lot of those images. However if you make that exception, other 'illegal' things would have to be screened as well and then you have where we are now. Why not make different categories of 'illegal'; CP matching hashes is a direct hit and gone you are. While 'illegal to distribute' (which probably gets more pressure to fight against than even cp) would be flagged in private; if you move it to public you have a problem.
I believe that private means you cannot touch it at all, but we are talking 'the cloud' here so that option is out the door anyway.
