You need only look as far as Caspar Bowden and how he was treated by Microsoft to know how they really feel about privacy. It would be interesting to hear what - if anything - Brad Smith has to say about it.
They only started caring when they were given no other choice but to do so.
In 2002, Caspar left FIPR and joined Microsoft, where he became chief privacy adviser for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Microsoft was originally keen on privacy, and Caspar got the company to sponsor privacy research in various ways. But the company’s direction changed as cloud services became important and as the Bush surveillance laws gave the agencies access to cloud data. In 2011 Caspar left. As he told the story, he was responsible for briefing Microsoft’s government sales managers in 40 countries about privacy, and told them that if they sold Microsoft cloud services to non-US governments, the US Fisa court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveilliance court) would give the FBI, NSA and CIA unfettered access to everything. For this, he was fired.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
