Microsoft Is Using Popular App To Spy On You

If you use Facebook, Twitter, or basically any part of the internet at all, sometime in the last 24 hours you’ve seen Microsoft’s newest tool, the age-guesser. Everyone’s sharing it, using it, and laughing over (or feeling insulted by) the results. But the tool’s rapid spread also accidentally highlights one of the biggest challenges of the digital age: the fine print.

The tool, How-Old.net, has gone viral very fast because of how hilariously wrong it often is. The world-weary baby at the top of this post, for example, was 9 months old when the picture was taken, which isn’t too far off — but the Cheerios on her tray were neither sixteen, male, nor in fact human at all. Plug in fictional characters or politicians, and the results are jokes that basically write themselves.

Microsoft isn’t planning to make age guessing a fixture of its Office Suite anytime soon; the tool was put together quickly as a demo for the company’s Azure cloud platform and services. But buried in the fine print of the Azure terms and services, as Fast Company points out, is a clause that might give Microsoft more power than you want them to have."

Read more here: http://consumerist.com/2015/05/01/pla...