This has a big implication for the national debate.

The United States today experiences much higher levels of identity theft, spam and government profiling than Europe because we have failed to establish necessary legal safeguards.

We think it's very useful that people can go to the Internet and get a lot of information, but we think it's appropriate to draw the line where personal information is given at a Web site.

We're not big fans for the posting of privacy policies because what is much more important is privacy practice.

It's sweeping, in terms of its impact, and we hope this is the start of better practices on Microsoft's part.

This is a very important development in terms of online privacy.