There are huge legal ramifications if Microsoft or other cloud providers start snooping into financial data or business intellectual property. That could be defined as corporate espionage and is illegal. Additionally, governments are and will use cloud services, so you start getting into the area of national security and espionage, also illegal. Then there are other privacy concerns under things like HIPAA. Absolutely illegal for anyone not authorized to even look at those records.


>So does Facebook, Amazon, and a dozen other major sites, except Wikipedia, which purposefully does none of it short of anonymous monitoring to improve their service.
>
>I'm talking about .NET ... on business apps ... on business data ... from the multitude of companies out there doing business, and on the code developers working at those companies write...
>
>That "private data and code" will be mined to determine transactions, business volume, dollar amounts, whatever. It's coming (if it's not already here, and I'd wager it is ... just in a relatively primitive form to what's coming).