Symantec President and CEO Michael Brown said that transparency and awareness are essential when user privacy is at stake.
Symantec claims to currently own the world's largest civilian intelligence network, and according to president and CEO Michael Brown, the key to keeping customers happy with the collection of telemetry data from their computers is transparency.
"We're very open about collecting telemetry data, so customers actually prefer to contribute to it," Mr Brown told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday, according to ZDNet.
We are aware of Microsoft's case and the friction that exists over the mandatory collection of telemetry data from Windows 10, but Mr. Brown seems to have downplayed the fact.
“Most people aren't that worried about it,” he said.
“However, our approach is that we need to be transparent with our customers.”
It should be mentioned that Symantec currently collects telemetry data from 110 million business customers and 60 million consumers, resulting in the company's database monitoring 8,000,000,000,000 objects in real time, and is updated at a rate of 200,000 rows per second!
"We've invested more than anyone else in understanding more about the threat landscape. There are probably some governments that have invested that much... but I don't think there are any other companies," Brown continued.
The company is currently building an analytics platform to make its research data available to third parties, via an API.
Brown said the data will be available to anyone interested, including competitors. Symantec's first application to use the platform, called Risk Insight, will be available within the next six months.
The head of Symantec said that his company does not believe in the logic of backdoors, but that it will follow whatever the law dictates.
"As a society, as an open society, we have to compromise, follow and agree with our laws,
