Privacy concerns very important to Bing

Over the last ten years, Microsoft, has been in and out of court facing various anti trust charges in both the United States and the European Union. As result, the company is closely monitored with how it bundles different products together, in relation to the various products that it sells. This has opened the door for other issues surrounding the company, most notably, privacy issues in regards to the storage of personal data on their Bing search engine. In the E.U., this legal issue was threatening to bring the company back into court on another contentious situation. In surprise, move the company agreed with E.U. regulators to discard all personal information collected every six months. This follows other conciliatory moves made by the company such as: when they agreed to distribute competitors’ browsers with the popular Windows Operating software last month.

What all of this shows, is that Microsoft has changed their legal strategy from attempting to fight the regulators to cooperating. This could be a signal that the company may be in process of trying to reinvent itself as it moves beyond the old image of an established giant, to one that is on the cutting edge as far as innovations are concerned. The recent decisions to cooperate with regulators are the most obvious sign of this.