Microsoft knows social media and readers of the Guardian are not going to be a buyer of Office surveillance and metrics software. So it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t apologize - ie, it doesn’t matter if they delegate out customer service for non paying end users to social media. This is different than say Facebook and Google, where they need more people who click on ads and convert, which is a form of payer, so they’re going to be more sensitive to user perceptions despite the absence of a national privacy policy. It’s the #1 misconception, that there is a regulatory failure around social media privacy, when really it’s everything else where there’s no meaningful market mechanism to “opt out” of eg your employer’s privacy violating surveillance.

So to be really precise, the best way to get a remedy for non-paying poor people from a giant company is consistently, always, the law. It’s not a fucking post mortem scrum.