Recent changes in Google’s privacy policy, changes which place individual information more squarely in the hands of online advertisers than ever before, has caused Microsoft to go on the attack. Microsoft ads say their company puts “people first” as opposed to advertisers first, and that their products provide people with a level of control over their information that Google can no longer hold claim to. This sounds like a smart marketing move on the part of Microsoft, trading on the search and tech giant’s biggest Achilles heel right now, but in practice the campaign is likely to fall flat for one simple reason- no one cares about their privacy online.

Sure, people don’t want their information to fall into the hands of malicious individuals who will attempt to steal their identity and run up a whole bunch of expenses using their credit cards and bank account information. But as far as online privacy goes, that’s about as much as people care. No one cares about their private information being sold to advertisers. No one cares that Google is scanning their email to better target marketing messages. People just don’t care about online privacy the way Microsoft thinks they do.

It’s easy to think people care about privacy if you get all your information from within the echo-chamber of tech blogs, experts and analysts. And people will give a knee-jerk “of course I care about privacy!” bru-ha-ha when some new open policy is enacted. But if you want to know what people really care about you look at their actions, not their words. You look at what they do, not at what they say. And you’d be hard pressed to find many examples of people jumping ship en-masse from a platform or service, especially a free platform or service, just because of  privacy concerns.

Look at Facebook. If people cared about privacy no one would be on Facebook anymore. Yet the site is quickly approaching 1 billion users. Sure, people raise a big vocal stink about the company’s privacy policies whenever the change, but very few people have left the site because of it. We’re going to see the same thing with Google’s recent privacy changes- a whole lot of noise, very little defection, long-term growth for the company and its platforms.

People just don’t care about privacy in the way Microsoft and the tech-elite think they do (or “should”).

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