The prevailing sentiment at the Internet & Social Media Law conference which took place in London this week was the importance of ensuring rules of conduct and laws for new technologies that respect timeless rights and values.
There was a lot of discussion about the need to ensure that the kinds of traditional protections that we have all had, not just for years but for centuries, for information that is stored on paper persists when we move our information to the cloud. One area in which this is relevant today is the debate as to the appropriate balance to be struck between the clear and compelling need of governments to access digital data to fight crime and protect the public’s safety with the interests of their citizens’ expectations of due process and the proper rule of law. Recent court decisions involving Microsoft help ensure that we do not leave timeless values such as privacy behind. This was a significant topic of discussion on the ‘Investigatory Powers and Law Enforcement on the Internet’ panel on which I participated.
The need to ensure that timeless values persist is also what led to Microsoft filing a new lawsuit in April of this year against the United States government to stand up for what we believe are our customers’ constitutional and fundamental rights – rights that help protect privacy and promote free expression. It’s also what led us to putting together our best ideas in a number of policy areas designed as a roadmap to help policymakers take full advantage of what new technologies have to offer whilst maintaining those values. We shared these in a book we published earlier this year called A Cloud for Global Good. We did this not with a sense that we have all the answers – because we know we do not. No one has all the answers. But we think that there are certain tenets that must persist and are essential to maintaining trust in technology.