Do you think that your Microsoft email account might be compromised and wish you could see if anyone else has signed into it? This article will show you how to check your Microsoft Account Security and Privacy. You can check your email sign-on history, browsing history, all the services you have with Microsoft and much more. Check all this by signing into https://account.microsoft.com.
Just like Facebook and Google have privacy checkups, so does Microsoft. However, it seems to be not widely known that people with Microsoft email accounts have this same benefit. A Microsoft account is simply any account you use to access Microsoft…
- email accounts ending in outlook.com, live.com, msn.com, hotmail.com
- Your X-box account
- Your Skype account
I logged into one my Microsoft accounts recently to see my log-in history. The parts most critical to me are the Privacy and Security areas.
Microsoft Privacy Settings
Under this setting are Browsing History, Search History, Location Activity, Voice Activity and Cortana’s Notebook. This is a lot of personal information, especially if you’ve chosen to use Cortana as a personal assistant.
In this area you can see all the data being held in these areas, you can choose to download everything, delete the history, or leave it there. I’m not sure how far back you can go as I scrolled just 2 months.
Microsoft Security Settings
Here’s where you can choose to change your password, check to see if the security you’re using is good and see from where you have signed into your Microsoft account.
If you think your email has been compromised/hacked, this is where you’ll want to come and click on the ‘Review recent activity’. By clicking on the IP address, it shows the approximate location your account was signed in from. If you see something hinky, now is the time to change your password!
Microsoft Account Security & Privacy Video
Here’s a short video where I’ve walked you through one of my lesser-used Microsoft accounts to give you a behind the curtain look at what information is available to you and how you can control what’s kept in your history.
Microsoft Account Security and Privacy
While it’s great to have these security and privacy checks available here with your Microsoft Account as well as Google and Facebook, I take these reports and ability to ‘delete’ my history with a dose of reality. With the volume of data breaches out there along with some healthy skepticism of how effective these ‘controls’ are, I’m not 100% convinced that my deleting my browsing or search history really is effective.