If Microsoft cares about privacy, when will they change Skype back to the encrypted peer-to-peer architecture it had before they bought it? If Facebook cares about privacy, why is their signup page not just a redirect to diaspora, friendica etc.? And why can't google split stuff up into subdomains, even if that'd mean no precious .google cookies? Okay, the last two are a bit silly, but I just don't feel like looking up and rattling down all those laundry lists of the ways of how they shit all over privacy again and again, just to eek half a percentage point out of something somewhere, in the name of functionality and convenience as if there aren't lots of more promising and unexplored avenues to improve those.
Of course, none of these companies are monoliths, and I don't doubt that there are people in them that genuinely care. But on the whole, you are really* saying that the companies care about privacy, but just pretend it's about money because Congress is more interested in money than they are? I doubt that, mildly put.
> If Microsoft cares about privacy, when will they change Skype back to the encrypted peer-to-peer architecture it had before they bought it?
A bit off-topic, but Skype's actual voice traffic is still primarily P2P. You can verify this yourself using basic network analyzer tools (I used nettop on OSX) to check the destination address of packets. Multiple times over the last couple of years (after they allegedly moved away from P2P) I verified that a voice call between Skype instances on Mac and on Windows was direct between my network and my peer's IP address.
I did not check if IM traffic is P2P. And it certainly connects to a lot of other remote addresses by default, which I'm guessing is for call-setup via their servers.
I may have been wrong about it, but I disagree it's off-topic. Lip service is one thing, pressuring other parties to give up their snooping is one thing, actually being committed and simply deleting or encrypting as much as they can so the question doesn't even arise, or even considering and talking about the trade-offs required to do so, that would be quite another. So it's all mostly window dressing to me. I believe that they care about their profits, but that's about it.
These corporations actually could afford to find out stuff about their markets by asking people who volunteer, by super traditional means that have been used for decades before the internet. They don't really need your complete life history, they just need a good rough idea, and then be honest engineers and programmers that make the best products they can make.
This "we need to internally probe you to improve customer service" stuff to a large degree is marketing run amok, not really something that is impossible to do without unless you don't subscribe to "the best product wins", which everybody loves to pay lip service to but then tries their best to circumvent.
Of course, none of these companies are monoliths, and I don't doubt that there are people in them that genuinely care. But on the whole, you are really* saying that the companies care about privacy, but just pretend it's about money because Congress is more interested in money than they are? I doubt that, mildly put.