Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To Care
Earlier this year, Google announced a privacy policy change that was widely covered by tech blogs, the mainstream press and which generated much governmental concern. Last month, Microsoft announced the same type of change.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story lands eight months after Microsoft ran its “Putting People First” ad campaign attacking Google’s decision to consolidate user data across its services under one privacy policy — a move Google publicly defended in a “setting the record straight” blog post amid tech-press, mainstream-press and governmental concern. Search Engine Land had already framed the earlier fight as Google putting a price on privacy back in October 2011.
Now the roles are inverted: per the article and the confirmed relationship record, Microsoft last month announced the same type of privacy policy change, and the reaction has been near-silence — only niche syndication (IP Osgoode) picked it up, versus the broad coverage Google drew in early 2012.
First-order effects
- Microsoft users’ data is now subject to the same cross-service consolidation Google users faced after January 2012, while Microsoft absorbs none of the governmental concern or press scrutiny that accompanied Google’s version.
- Google gains an immediate rebuttal: the company that built its early-2012 ad offensive on this exact practice has adopted it, blunting any future Microsoft privacy attacks on the search giant.
Second-order effects
- Privacy stops functioning as a competitive wedge between the two firms — with both now running identical policy structures, differentiation shifts back to product features and pricing rather than data-handling promises.
- Regulators and advocacy groups face an awkward precedent: pursuing Google alone for a practice Microsoft also engages in looks selective, raising the bar for enforcement aimed at a single named player.
Third-order effects
- If press and government attention tracks brand salience rather than actual data practices, cross-service data consolidation becomes the default structure for large consumer platforms regardless of which company moves first.
- The pattern points toward pressure migrating from reputational skirmishes to formal rulemaking, since voluntary competitive shaming demonstrably fails when incumbents converge on the same behavior.
The trend: Consumer-platform privacy policies are converging on unified cross-service data use, with public and regulatory outrage keyed to a company’s reputation rather than the substance of its practices.