Microsoft teams with Google in name of privacy.

Search rivals Microsoft and Google have joined a coalition to simplify and clarify US law to protect the online privacy of netizens from government snooping.

The companies have teamed with more than 20 other technology providers and lobby groups from the right and left of US politics to update a US privacy law that's being applied to peoples' internet communications, but was written in 1986 - the year of big hair, Chernobyl, and the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, but most certainly not the web, email, or mobile phones.

They've joined the Digital Due Process coalition, brainchild of Center for Democracy and Technology vice president Jim Dempsey, to force a change to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).

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