Learn more about our technology policy initiatives:
> Accessibility
> Interoperability
> Child Online Safety
> Privacy
> Security
Working in partnership to ensure that technology evolves to meet all of Europe’s needs.
As technology accelerates change, we are working collaboratively to ensure that progress reflects the needs of Europe’s governments, economies and citizens. Focusing on five core issues of accessibility, interoperability, child online safety, privacy and security, we will help consumers to enjoy all of technology’s rich opportunities.
Accessibility
Information and communication technology (ICT) has the power to transform people’s lives by helping them to realise greater social and economic freedom — but only if they can access it. As a leading software company, we appreciate our responsibility in creating technologies and tools that open up the benefits of ICT to broad sections of society - in particularly to those with disabilities.
Click here to learn more about Microsoft and Accessibility.
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Interoperability
The ICT revolution continues to deliver new products and services to more -- and more diverse -- users, enabling greater productivity, access to information and entertainment. As new technologies and companies multiply, the links between old and new products from different companies become more complex. Today, the ability of different products developed by different vendors to work together is more important than ever.
Reflecting huge changes in our industry, we are transforming the way we work. Our user-friendly technologies bring people and businesses innumerable benefits across the world, but we also know that consumers should not have to be locked into or out of particular products – so we are working continually towards a model offering choice. No single vendor can address increasingly complex needs alone. That is why, even as we create software that can be used by people around the world, we also work to ensure more open and interoperable products. This includes partnering with competitors, working with open source communities, ensuring open connections to our high-volume products and sharing more information.
Click here for more information about Microsoft and Interoperability.
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Child Online Safety
The internet offers Europe’s children tremendous educational and social benefits, but may also expose them to harm. We therefore help raising awareness of law enforcement and technology solutions that can help to reduce the risks faced by children online. We partner with NGOs such as Child Focus to bring child online safety education to schools through our employee volunteers programme, and raise awareness at events such as the European Safer Internet Day. We engage on many levels with industry, business, law enforcement and government to create an expanding ‘culture of online safety’.
Click here to learn more about Microsoft and Child Online Safety.
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Privacy
Europeans are spending more of their lives online, with the web providing access to entertainment, banking and even healthcare. Yet the internet, to which we entrust so much, will fail to achieve its full potential if we lose faith in the privacy of the information we share. We are committed and active participants in high profile initiatives such as Data Protection Day, celebrated each year in January.
Click here for more information on Microsoft and Privacy.
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Security
The internet can act as a platform for Europe’s innovation and imagination, but only if public confidence is maintained and cybercrime tackled effectively. We are helping to establish a trusted community across the internet, embracing people, data, software and hardware. Also, partnering with other leading technology companies, we have founded the ‘Trust in Digital Life’ partnership to define a vision for trustworthy ICT-related products, including devices, applications, services and infrastructures.
Technology is only part of the solution, with the consumer being at the heart of defense in depth. We work to ensure that security technologies are user friendly and work hand in hand with consumers, enabling productivity rather than impeding it.
Click here to get more information about Microsoft and Security.
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