14 DAY TRIAL // The NSA may be getting a beating in the media nowadays, but the tech industry seems to be doing just fine.
Many worried that, with the NSA revelations, including the relationship between the intelligence agency and the Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, many tech companies would be losing their popularity.
Reuters reports, however, that none of the companies have seen much of an impact on their business. At the same time, small companies offering encryption solutions are growing rapidly as more and more people try to add a new layer of privacy over their Internet lives.
And while the business side of these companies hasn’t been hit too hard, their reputation has been suffering.
Google admitted to this in a court filing last week, where it said the news coverage from the past three months had been causing “substantial harm to Google’s reputation and business.”
The filing meant, of course, to convince the government to allow it to publish more information about the requests it gets from agencies such as the NSA.
Previous reports also indicated that cloud service providers were having issues in the United States and that similar companies from Europe were getting an influx of traffic and customers.
After all, as even the Vice President of the European Commission said, if European customers cannot trust the US government because of the spying allegations, then they may not trust the cloud providers either.
The fact of the matter is that, for now, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether the reports so far have a big impact on tech companies, as many have suggested, or very little, as the companies claim.
The truth is, perhaps, somewhere in between these two extremes and, since the reports on the NSA leaks will carry on for months to come, the effects could take longer to settle in.