"Unless required by law" is wording required to enable a mechanism called "legal hold". If an authority or lawyer discovers some documents for a case they get to prevent their automatic deletion until that case gets closed. Basically, you don't want to lose evidence if there's a warrant or ongoing lawsuit. I really see no problem with that clause in most ToS documents.
Now, I think you can do shady stuff with that wording as well, but I guess you can also get sued if you kept or used an unreasonable percentage of your data longer than when you promised to delete it.
> Basically, you don't want to lose evidence if there's a warrant or ongoing lawsuit. I really see no problem with that clause in most ToS documents.
Perhaps more nit-pickinlgy specific, they may be compelled by law (the courts or an agency with enforcement capacity) to maintain evidence if there's a warrant or ongoing lawsuit.
> is wording required to enable a mechanism called "legal hold"
I don't think this is accurate. At least in Norway you can't "just not" keep records required by law - any section in a contract in conflict with current law would simply be invalid?
I think the section just clarifies that Microsoft will comply with laws requiring them to keep data (eg the "anti-terror" laws that might require data retention).
Now, I think you can do shady stuff with that wording as well, but I guess you can also get sued if you kept or used an unreasonable percentage of your data longer than when you promised to delete it.