03.15.10

SXSW Used by Microsoft as Platform to Hypocritically Slam Google

Posted in FUD, Google, Microsoft at 4:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Privacy offender criticises another in a public event, proving that FUD is still a strategic focus at Microsoft

Microsoft has a history of exploiting SXSW, but today’s subject is a talk Microsoft gave there about “privacy”. Recent examples that we gave of Microsoft’s privacy abuses can be found in [1, 2, 3, 4]. We even gave an example last night. According to someone who blogged from SXSW over the weekend, Microsoft is up to the usual behaviour [1, 2]. It’s part of a theme of FUD that Microsoft is using, hoping that nobody would spot the sheer hypocrisy.

At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft’s Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google’s privacy “fails” with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about.

This is Microsoft. Of course it would speak about another company’s privacy violations and never about its own. What utter hypocrisy. █

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