Now Microsoft is working to remove the black eye they received for being listed as a big supporter of the NSA. They have already pushed back on a court order for the data of a non-US citizen (which others are jumping on board about) that is stored in a data center in Ireland and now Nadella is working on the soft side of this with comments about privacy and trust.

Nadella made some interesting overtures about privacy, trust and how it relates to the market saying:

“If you think about HP, Intel and Microsoft, we’re global companies and in order to be able to thrive in a global world we need our government to have a policy that creates great trust with its own citizens, but also citizens of the world and other nations,”

Nadella says that the US needs to stop the attempted collection of data from their non-US customers because these collection attempts break the trust that Microsoft needs to build to maintain their customers he highlighted non-US customers saying “Until we can bring some modicum of process of law into how governments can discover data that we store, what jurisdiction does the US government have over customers’ data that which is not in fact resident in the United States”

Oddly absent was any mention of the data collection that is rampant in the US. Nadella and Microsoft still need to answer to their US customers about their cooperation with the NSA and others. Without a change in Microsoft’s polices (or US laws) people are still not going to trust Microsoft. After all just because the data is safe in a non-US data center does not mean that Microsoft will not be required to turn it over if it ever travels over US controlled data lines…

We mentioned that we fully expect Microsoft to be on a big PR push about trust and we are seeing this unfold. We just wonder what will be next in their bag of tricks as they try to win back consumers they have lost over the past years.

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