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Comment by Spearchucker | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that for organisations like Microsoft and Apple it's about profitability. If they can't protect their non-US clients' data they stand to lose those clients. That loss must surely be greater than the legal cost of "standing up to the US government".

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An episode of the Cybersecurity Podcast with Peter Singer was recently talking about the Snowden leaks and how the west coast (Apple, Microsoft, et. al.) had to go to the east coast (Washington, Pentagon) and tell them to stop saying that the government spying was only on non-US citizens and foreigners since that demographic is still the vast majority of their business.

All corporations have a primary responsibility to benefit their shareholders. That they can combine it with a noble cause is an added bonus.

Quite honestly, I don't think they would lose that many clients. The USG has been trampling over the rights of non-US citizens for years. Snowden's leaks showed just how bad that is. The truth is that the vast majority of those people don't care enough to do anything about it.

Even people who do care (and are technologically minded) still have their Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts and online file storage. The effort required to change is greater than the threat to their privacy.

That will not change until the loss of their privacy actually has a visible and impactful effect upon those people. I.e. people start being persecuted by the government for their beliefs or actions in private.

Modern western government's are too smart for that though. Those kind of non-subtle sledgehammer tactics don't work in a society where bad publicity can't be controlled. As an example, see the UK government's U-turn on immigration policy after the public's reaction to a photo of a two year old drowned immigrants's child on a Greek beach laying face down in the waves.

> All corporations have a primary responsibility to benefit their shareholders.

This is false. The mission statement of the company lays out its responsibility and what shareholders can expect. Shareholders choose to invest or not. A not-for-profit company is an example.

A not for profit company still benefits the shareholders. The benefit is just not monetary.

That's not the definition of 'benefit' that junto was using. Let's focus on claims, not wording.

That national governments spy on their citizens and each other is immaterial. If cloud providers cannot adhere to the EU data protection directive, EU organisations will be legally bound to find services that can.

> Quite honestly, I don't think they would lose that many clients.

You're underestimating the amount of industrial espionage that the U.S. does to favour its multinational corps. MS, Apple et al. were fine to benefit from the fragments this might bring them when it was a fairly well guarded secret and it was assumed that the U.S. was on relatively equal footing with other countries such as France, UK, Germany, Japan in this regard. The Snowden leaks show that the NSA capacity is a couple orders of magnitude larger than any other country and suddenly the U.S. players would lose more business through distrust than they would gain through government espionage.

You're saying the parent is underestimating, and yet you provide zero proof of that underestimation. Without anything to go on, in regards that Microsoft or Apple (et al) benefit from NSA or similar derived industrial espionage, you're just slandering them with empty accusations.

All corporations have a primary responsibility to benefit their shareholders.

Wandering off-topic as I am, that's just an opinion that gained ground in the seventies. Not everyone thinks it's a good idea and with any luck it'll die eventually.

> I suspect that for organisations like Microsoft and Apple it's about profitability.

So? The relative freedom of modern democracy is significantly tied up in the rise of independent merchant/commercial classes.

At the end society is build on cost-vs-benefit calculations, while you might not steal a car because it's morally wrong you most likely do so because you don't want to go to prison, if government could enforce internet piracy on any reasonable level whether you support file sharing or not you wouldn't be downloading anything if it meant getting a 100,000 fine a week later either.

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