Understand data lifecycle - processing
Microsoft will use and process data to provide online services, provide professional services, and conduct a set of legitimate business operations (LBOs) to support its ability to provide the services. When a customer uses an online service, all customer data and all personal data within the data we generate (diagnostic data and service-generated data) are used to:
- Deliver functional capabilities as licensed, configured, and used by the customer and customer users, including providing personalized user experiences.
- Troubleshoot (preventing, detecting, and repairing problems).
- Provide ongoing improvements (installing the latest updates and making improvements to user productivity, reliability, efficacy, and security).
When a customer uses professional services, all professional services data are used to:
- Deliver the professional services, including providing technical support, professional planning, advice, guidance, data migration, deployment, and solution/software development services.
- Troubleshoot (preventing, detecting, investigating, mitigating, and repairing problems, including Security Incidents and problems identified during delivery of professional services).
- Provide ongoing improvement (maintaining the professional services, including installing the latest updates, making improvements to the reliability, efficacy, quality, and security of the professional services, and fixing bugs and making other improvements to Microsoft products and services based on issues identified during delivery of professional services).
We don't use a customer's professional services data to provide professional services for other customers. However, other customers may benefit from the work we perform. For example, if a customer reports a problem with an Office service, the same problem experienced by other customers may automatically be fixed when the reported issue is resolved.
When data is used to perform legitimate business operations (LBOs), Microsoft limits its use of personal data by using only pseudonymized data originating from diagnostic data and aggregate personal data prior to using it for LBOs such that it is no longer linkable back to users.