Microsoft’s Opportunity To Capitalize on Data Privacy (Premium)

The past few weeks have been filed with headlines with everything from your entire digital life has been stolen to images of Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. While the verdict is still out if the Cambridge Analytics scandal is going to have any significant impact on Facebook's longevity, it has done one thing, opened the door to the conversation about your digital privacy.

It's almost a bit humorous too, that this is the topic that is making consumers become aware of how they can be exploited online. No, it's not the almost weekly data breaches that expose your financial information to the criminals of the world, it's that a company was able to scrape all your likes and activity to be targeted for political gains.

But, at the end of the day, people are now more seriously looking at the data they give to these services and while I don't believe this will have any noticeable impact on the networks where consumers interact, for companies who own this type of data, they are now finding themselves in the spotlight.

It's because of this that Microsoft has a chance to grow its presence and confidence with consumers, an opportunity that does not come up very often. While the company does have its Bing search engine, when compared to Google, Facebook, and many other sites that are primarily driven by advertisement revenue, Microsoft fills out its bottom line mostly with services like Office, Azure, Windows, Xbox, Surface and many other non-advertisement driven revenue channels.

In a recent poll by Recode, it showed that Facebook is the least-trusted company of those in the survey, with 56% reporting that they did not trust the company followed by Google and then Uber. Keep in mind, this is stack ordered, so even though Google is only at 5%, this means that they are the second-least trusted of the possible options which include other companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and many others. While 5% is significantly lower than Facebook's result, this means that 5% of the respondents thought Facebook was more trustworthy than Google.

While I wouldn't personally put a lot of weight into the poll, it does provide a small look at how the American population is viewing these companies.

And for its part, Microsoft has done a good job of showing that it cares about your data and trying to protect it. The company's Chief Legal Office, Brad Smith has been a vocal advocate for protecting data and of course, the company's legal battles over data stored in an Irish data center show that the organization doesn't simply roll-over every time they get a government request for data.

Further, the company has started bringing enterprise-level security protections to the consumer SKUs of Office and you have to acknowledge that Windows Defender is also another example of the company actively protecting its users from malicious activity. While I know users are still asking for an 'off' switch to telemetry collection in Windows 10, the compa...