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Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

This response really disappoints me. That seemed like he completely deflected the question and didn't answer. Im sure he measured his words carefully so that he wouldn't have to answer the inevitable, "will microsoft provide the same kinds of privacy protection as apple?"

Come on Bill G

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Of course they won't. It doesn't even make sense to ask them for this. Microsoft serves the government. The contracts they get from this are a large part of their revenue.

Mr Gates reiterated his view that the issue came down to a debate about whether governments can get at data they use to protect citizens. "Should governments be able to access information at all or should they be blind, that's essentially what we are talking about," he told the BBC.

Actually, the debate is whether the government should be allowed to force you to create something that does not exist.

It's a bit of both.

MS (that is Gates) has a long history of feeding the Feds anything they want; nothing surprising here to me.

Came here to say this. The feds almost universally use the MS ecosystem.

I was under the impression Bill Gates does not speak for MS anymore. He doesn't work there and it would be horribly unprofessional to make promises on behalf of the current CEO.

Bill Gates is still a member of the Microsoft board: http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-board-of-directors/

He's back on the board IIRC. That's still quite a bit of influence.

Worse, American outlets are reporting it as him taking sides with the FBI, which is all most people will read.

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