Hacker News Reader

Comment by rt4mn | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has been a particularly bad actor in this space. They have been hiring lobbyists to advocate at the state level for shitty "consumer privacy bills", specifically because they want to forestall and kneecap federal legislation.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/tech-lobbyists-are-pus...

View on HN

What's Microsoft's interest in this? They don't have a big search or ads business. What are they doing with Consumer data?

"They don't have a big search or ads business."

$11.5 billion is not small.

From 10K

     Revenue, classified by significant product and service offerings, was as follows:
  
     (In millions)                                                                
                                                                                  
     Year Ended June 30,                  2022          2021          2020        
                                                                      
     Server products and cloud services   $ 67,321      $ 52,589      $ 41,379    
     Office products and cloud services     44,862        39,872        35,316    
     Windows                                24,761        22,488        21,510    
     Gaming                                 16,230        15,370        11,575    
     LinkedIn                               13,816        10,289        8,077     
     Search and news advertising            11,591        9,267         8,524     
     Enterprise Services                    7,407         6,943         6,409     
     Devices                                6,991         6,791         6,457     
     Other                                  5,291         4,479         3,768     
                                                                                  
     Total                                $ 198,270     $ 168,088     $ 143,015

Their interest is in their bottom line and avoiding regulation. Pretty much any company that has a lot of users creating accounts will be impacted by even the most milquetoast privacy regulation to some degree or another, and I guess microsoft sees the cost of hiring a bunch of lobyists as cheaper then having to deal with the regulation that might come about if they dont.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com