What is Skype’s commitment to online safety?

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    Microsoft has a long-standing commitment to online child safety. As specified in our Code of Conduct, we prohibit activity that exploits, harms, or threatens to harm children across our services. Skype does not allow any content or activity that harms or threatens to harm a child through the distribution of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) content which includes grooming, trafficking, or exploitation of children for sexual purposes. To achieve our goal and commitment to improving online child safety we constantly engage with a variety of stakeholders, to discuss how we might adapt our approach to address this complex and ever evolving issue across different geographical regions.

    Skype uses scanning technologies to create digital signatures (known as hashes) of certain images and video content to prevent CSEA from being distributed on Skype. To continue to protect the safety and rights of our users, Skype is innovating on technologies to improve detection of child sexual exploitation in certain geographies. We use information pertaining to the use of Skype by accounts that have been suspended for a severe Code of Conduct violation to improve our ability to detect CSEAI activity involving Skype and may disable some Skype features for certain users, based on that information. We are not making any changes to our enforcement policies. If you believe your Skype features have been disabled in error, please reach out to Customer Support. The Code of Conduct in the Microsoft Services Agreement continues to apply to all use of our services.