Comment by nolok
2 years ago
I genuinely don't understand how you can come to this conclusion.
If I open the door to someone and allow them to take picture inside my house, there is no legal understanding that they are now allowed to make and keep a copy of my keys.
The understanding is that I allowed to take the picture (make the sync), through the access that I gave (door opened / imap connection made). And the underlying understanding is actually that I remain in control of access later on, meaning they can't do it again without me opening the door / connecting again.
Microsoft knows that, because they buried that information inside the webpage that the consent dialog links to, except the dialog doesn't say "important detail there" but "for more information see there" aka pretend the dialog's summary is correct.
If anything, coupled with the awkward Outlook (but not Outlook) naming this is one more of their modern move that will piss off entreprise IT admins. Your employee opens the "wrong" outlook, type his office credentials and then Microsoft now has outside of your corp account a copy of all data of that employee AND its credentials. If there was any actual real competitor in their field they would never be able to pull such crap.
Well, the consent item is "sync" and that translates in your sample more to "you consent to let them take pictures of your house whenever they want". And for that, a key property is the username (or your house key). Otherwise, "sync"/"taking photos any time" would not work. You could argue that "sync" could be considered 1-time sync or permanent sync ... but honestly we talk about IMAP and a permanent connection to fetch Emails. Let us not assume we talk about a one time "sync".
And yes, I agree that Microsoft buried the nasty password detail with the purpose of not disengaging the users. I also think that anything data privacy related, normal users are completely overwhelmed with no chance to ever understand the situation.
I share your thought about replicating passwords. Not to the concrete worry you express but that it is a really bad practice compared to industry practice (see OAuth2 refresh token).