How would you, a non-MS employee, let alone inner circle management level, know what MS do or don't do? Or do you mean they don't "freely" give things to the US government but only in exchange for something?

>I can tell you that Microsoft is not freely giving things to the US government. You may be out of the news loop there in Germany, but Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other companies have repeatedly denied access to data without a court order.
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>>You can install versions like Cyanogenmod, which you can compile yourself from sources, so you could check in at least in theory there.
>>Google apps are NOT in those distributions (you can load them, but at least then you can think about the risk for each app)
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>>I feel better with the option to check sources plus the hope others have read them than a claim from a big US company - as the company may be served those "Do not tell" things by the US gov.
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>>my 0.02€
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>>thomas