At Words and Wires, we take privacy very seriously. Our approach is to try to remain "under the radar" of US agencies like the NSA by avoiding multinationals like Google, who depend on user data and metadata to sell targeted advertising. This reduces exposure to the NSA, since they don't have your data and metadata easily accessible on Google's servers for them to search. To get at your data, they'd have to specifically target you, as an individual, and compromise your individual virtual machine server in your office or in a European datacenter. This is several orders of magnitude more difficult than simply scanning Google's servers, but we're under no illusion that a server built and run by an individual or or civilian organisation can withstand a targeted attack by the NSA, with the full strength of the US cybersecurity establishment behind it.

Apple privacy policy

Of the US multinationals dominating the IT landscape, Apple's business model is clearly oriented towards selling hardware to their clients, rather than selling data about their clients to third parties. They've published a report on government information requests, where they describe the number of requests by country, and Apple's compliance. It's quite interesting to note the following quote:

Perhaps most important, our business does not depend on collecting personal data. We have no interest in amassing personal information about our customers. We protect personal conversations by providing end-to-end encryption over iMessage and FaceTime. We do not store location data, Maps searches, or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

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