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Microsoft secretly alters files in OneDrive for Business 
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Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 12:30 pm
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http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... ss-1244538

That sounds dodgy for many reasons.

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Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:19 pm
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Sounds incredibly vague, why not show examples of the changes?

Edit: the original post does include the code examples. The HTML code shown is 'easy' to explain. You can share OneDrive folders as web pages. It looks like MS are putting in some additional directives to include specific directives for IE 9 or later to give the visitor to the site additional identity information (i.e. it shows whose page it is, as opposed to saying the page belong to MS OneDrive). A lot of hosting sites will automatically add their own cruft to HTML code to help it better embed into the site.

The MS Office files sounds like they are watermarking them, so that they can be traced if their is a breech or to stop them serving the files out to another customer by mistake.

What would be interesting is to see if this is a function of SharePoint or Office365 hosted SharePoint, that it puts the UUIDs in to the documents as a way of identifying thru customer/department for indexing purposes. It would also be interesting to see what happens when the file is sent from on Office 365 customer to another. Does the UUID change or does it stay the same?

At first glance, there are some very obvious, non-creepy reasons why they might be doing this, but they should come clean and explain what they are doing.

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Fri Apr 25, 2014 4:12 am
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I would, though, expect files I placed on such a service to be untouched and unaltered by the service, unless the user specifically allows it - that it by making a choice to have those alterations made.

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Fri Apr 25, 2014 7:38 pm
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I would too. Unless I specifically open a folder up as web accessible. I wouldn't expect it to make any changes to the HTML code. But I assume that it automatically thinks it will be viewed in a browser, so puts the relevant header in to allow it to be shown properly over OneDrive.

I have a feeling that the modification of the Office documents is 'normal' behaviour, when you are using SharePoint, but I don't know it well enough to confirm that.

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Sat Apr 26, 2014 6:42 am
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