How does Microsoft ensure its employees and its products maintain high standards of privacy?
Cullen: In a company as large as Microsoft, with more than 57,000 employees in 94 countries, change has to start with how employees are trained and end with how top executives are paid. And it does. We now offer three levels of privacy training for employees. Each caters to the employee’s job and how they use customer information or contribute to products. In terms of pay, the variable compensation of Microsoft’s top 600 employees now is based in part on how well their group or division attains privacy goals. We also have created three levels of privacy-related staff. There’s a corporate privacy group, which I am a member of and which is responsible for managing privacy on a company-wide level. We also have dedicated privacy staff and privacy “champs.” The privacy staff members are full-time employees in each major business unit whose sole job is to direct privacy efforts within their unit. The privacy “champs” are several hundred staff members whose job responsibilities include ensuri
