31–40 of 120 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did it neither for PR nor "principles", but for mere money. The US data hegemony is bad for business overseas.
Is there a difference morally between doing it for PR and doing it for money?
Not that I don't respect the decision, but something tells me that we would be less happy, in other instances, to see giant companies like MS decide when the law should apply to them.
As I see it, the judge had no choice but to issue the order, and Microsoft has no rational alternative but to defy it if they want to conduct business as an international provider of cloud services. The real problem is with Congress, not the courts. When they permitted intelligence agencies to run amok with absolutely no Constitutional boundaries, they thought very little about the long term consequences and cared even less.
The casualness with which the U.S. Government asks a private company to violate EU and Irish law is truly disturbing. The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
Agreed. Hopefully this encourages more people to stand up to unreasonable violations of privacy from our government.
> And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
The question of whether a company is following principles or motivated by profit/PR is so strange to me. The question is nonsense and the answer irrelevant.
Microsoft is not a person with principles. It's 90,000ish people with different principles. I'm sure some people really believe in the right to privacy, some want to avoid angering customers, some don't care, etc. The reasons and motivations behind a company's actions are as diverse as the actors involved.
We could argue about motivations all day, like the responses to your comment are doing, but it's pointless and irrelevant. Unless you want to hone in and talk about individual people there's no answer to the question, and we're just trading vague meaningless opinions. It's like arguing whether a mountain is rocky or sandy. Chances are that I can find both, so we should either get more specific or talk about averaging via a survey. It happened, and the results are the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have no possible way to know that.
Let's look at these at these two facts: 1) Many companies have pulled their data from US-based data centers for fear of government intrusion after the Snowden revelations. 2) The future of Microsoft's server business is in the cloud and they have (likely) told customers their data is safe if stored in the EU Thus it stands to reason that in order to keep customers and make money, they are motivated to win this case.
The casualness with which the U.S. Government asks a private company to violate EU and Irish law is truly disturbing. The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
> The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. Agreed. Hopefully this encourages more people to stand up to unreasonable violations of privacy from our government. > And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand. The question of whether a company is following principles or motivated by profit/PR is so strange to me. The question is nonsense and the…
The casualness with which the U.S. Government asks a private company to violate EU and Irish law is truly disturbing. The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
They did it neither for PR nor "principles", but for mere money. The US data hegemony is bad for business overseas.
if the ruling is upheld, web services that face legal discovery like google, dropbox, facebook, microsoft, etc will face an amazing burden of data retention cost. there is an amazing tax already on these services having to implement per government specific retention policies based on where they do business. for example in ireland, by law you need to be able to produce up to a year of content even if an account has be…
That said, I don't think this has much to do with protecting MS's customers, or for that matter standing up for them as it is presented. I'm pretty sure it's more about MS operations being able to continue to run in Ireland and the rest of the EU. If MS hands this data over, you can be assured that MS would face stiff penalties and restrictions to even be able to operate in the EU, and would likely have their Azure f…
Its an american owned and operated data center in Irelend (where I live). Presumably the email is 'owned' by an american and the case involves all american actors(cant really make that assumption I guess) so there dosn't seem to be anything to spark the interest of the Irish legislature. Unless you make the leap to the point that now america can just demand ALL the data in that data center which you certainly could.
This isn't really the same as a warrant either is it? They are not demanding to be allowed access to or to search the data center. Microsoft in America is being ordered to hand over a document that they have access to, where that document is seems irrelevant (just playing devils advocate).
Also the chances of any small to medium sized nation (particularly Ireland) getting on their high horses about this is quite unlikely due to the amount of money these large multi-nationals bring here. In fact if this is upheld I imagine it would be another boon for Ireland as the american companies will have to set up even more infrastructure so that they can argue that its a completely separate entity that they simply funnel customers to or whatever. If the companies act first they could even get favorable Irish legislation passed to prevent the type of treaty talked about in the article (although this would be a pretty ballsy move for Ireland)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did it neither for PR nor "principles", but for mere money. The US data hegemony is bad for business overseas.
Well, we can say that every company does everything only for money, and that's probably not far from the truth. However, exactly because this can be taken as an universal truth, it's generally advisable to not ponder on this while discussing what and how they do, because it does not add anything to the conversation. In this case, we can agree that it's the right thing (for us). Similarly, if you buy a good car, you d…
What I'm saying is that there are companies that care about your data for it is their strategy, and then there are companies like Microsoft that will happily steer the ship given whatever wind is blowing at them on any given day.
The casualness with which the U.S. Government asks a private company to violate EU and Irish law is truly disturbing. The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
> The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. Agreed. Hopefully this encourages more people to stand up to unreasonable violations of privacy from our government. > And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand. The question of whether a company is following principles or motivated by profit/PR is so strange to me. The question is nonsense and the…
No, they really aren't. It's not even true for a democracy, where "we the people" get to vote for a small elite, which in turns will enact laws taking into account lobbying pressure, pressure from political allies, personal interests, likelihood of being re-elected, and occasionally the interest of the people and personal convictions.
A company, especially at this size, is not a democracy. Maybe the janitor believes in privacy, and the clerk trusts the government, but at the end of the day, strategic decisions like this one rest in the hand of a small group at the top. Some of them may occasionally put their principles before "shareholder value" or "next week's bonus", but it looks pretty rare in practice.