Since the NSA Scandal, TechWeek Readers Are Suspicious Of Microsoft

The NSA surveillance scandal has damaged the reputations of e US companies like Apple and Microsoft, suggests the latest poll by TechWeekEurope.

We asked whether the tactics employed by the American intelligence agencies and revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden had an impact on the trust placed in certain hosting and cloud storage providers.

457 readers took part in the poll, and almost a third said they tend to avoid services provided by Microsoft. Last year, even the company’s former privacy advisor Caspar Bowden said he wouldn’t use something like OneDrive to store his data.

The results of the poll are not so much a criticism of Microsoft as the US government, which continues to authorise intrusive online surveillance on both domestic and foreign targets despite warnings that it could damage the revenues of the US-based IT companies.

Trust issues

Microsoft was voted as the least trustworthy company in our poll with 31.7 percent, followed by Apple with 22.1 percent.

We should note that Microsoft has always denied claims that it willingly collaborated with the NSA. The company, along with Yahoo and others, actually fought hard for the right to reveal the number of requests for data it receives from the US government – something that was achieved in January.

Yahoo was the third least trusted brand in our poll, with almost a fifth of the votes. GoDaddy, DropBox and Amazon were all in the middle of the table, with less than 10 percent each. Meanwhile, European cloud providers Swisscom and Artmotion received a vote of confidence, with their data protection credentials doubted by just four and two percent respectively.

Mateo Meier, director at www.artmotion.eu, said: “There’s a fine line between security and privacy when storing data, and now global companies are becoming wary of using brands such as Yahoo, Amazon and DropBox. These results show the detrimental effect that the recent revelations have had on international markets.

We should apologise for not including Google in this poll – this was an honest mistake, and does not show any favouritism on our part.

You can also take part in our latest poll:

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