Windows 10: PersonalVault

Error sign on the personal vault

:)

 

OneDrive Personal Vault employee access

Since you are asking about consumer technologies, I am a going to avoid talking about business products, other than to say that if you use Office365 business plans, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online, etc., your employers can see whatever they want at any time. Every time they do this, it is logged. Everything you do is also logged. PersonalVault is not for these business products, so I will say no more about that.

Regular support employees are simultaneously given access to a vast amount of information, and they are also restricted in what they can see, and what they can do with the information that they can see. I do not see any way that a regular support employee would ever be able to access your PersonalVault. The only way they would see that content is if you allowed them to remotely access your computer (with full control), and then you chose yourself to unlock your PersonalVault.

I haven't found the documentation yet that Microsoft crawls OneDrive for disallowed content, but if they do, it is not a human crawling your information, it is a webcrawler that is looking for patterns. It could be, hypothetically, that I have had what should be disallowed content on OneDrive for over 10 years. I was always aware of the possibility it could be flagged and/or deleted. but never had any problems.

One thing that is disturbing is the broad license in: Microsoft Services Agreement
To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services. If you publish Your Content in areas of the Service where it is available broadly online without restrictions, Your Content may appear in demonstrations or materials that promote the Service. Some of the Services are supported by advertising. Controls for how Microsoft personalizes advertising are available on the Security & privacy page of the Microsoft account management website. We do not use what you say in email, chat, video calls or voice mail, or your documents, photos or other personal files, to target advertising to you. Our advertising policies are covered in detail in the Privacy Statement.

As a support person for a long time, I have seen a few bad apples over the years, but they get caught, and everything is logged for future legal prosecution.