Microsoft moving agressively to encrypt customer data

My hat is off to Microsoft for their extremely aggressive efforts to encrypt customer data. In the wake of the Snowden leaks that revealed NSA collecting data from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and others, Microsoft has correctly recognized the serious impact that data collection could have on the company's bottom line, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Like most companies providing Internet-based services, the marketplace is global, and international customers are not going to be particularly happy that the NSA is collecting their email, text messages, and documents. Here is a snippet of what is being done, directly from Microsoft:

In light of these allegations, we’ve decided to take immediate and coordinated action in three areas:

• We are expanding encryption across our services.
• We are reinforcing legal protections for our customers’ data.
• We are enhancing the transparency of our software code, making it easier for customers to reassure themselves that our products do not contain back doors.

I never bought into the idea that these companies were actively cooperating with the NSA. It's just too easy to capture data streams from, say, a Microsoft data center somewhere else in the network.

There was a time when heavy encryption was processor-intensive and therefore expensive to do, but processing power is so cheap now it can be added without much cost or effort, and in the future, we will see nearly every personal and business communication that traverses the public Internet will be encrypted. It's just good business.