GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, who heads one of Silicon Valley’s largest domain registrar and Web hosting companies, said on Reddit that his company refuses to hand over data to the government without a warrant, and that, “Doing it any other way is bullshit.”
“You mention above that you are ‘known as staunch advocate for Fourth Amendment rights and customer protection/privacy,'” a Reddit user asked the CEO and board director during an AMA (ask me anything) segment Thursday. “What’s your stance on the last year’s worth of NSA revelations, and what steps is GoDaddy taking to protect your customers’ data from government surveillance?”
“I don’t want governments accessing our internal systems including customer information. Period full stop,” Irving responded. “I’m unaware of any tapping or infiltration of our network by the NSA. I’ve asked our ops team in the past if they’ve ever seen signs of NSA successfully tapping and they’ve always answered ‘no.'”
“For us to turn anything over to the government they need a court order. Doing it any other way is bullshit and I agree with people who say it’s a breach of customer trust when company’s jump to side with governments over customers.”
Irving’s remarks could be interpreted as a cuts against the bulk of other Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc., with whom GoDaddy is approaching in scale.
The National Security Agency revealed last month that such companies were fully aware of and complicit with one of the agency’s biggest bulk Internet surveillance programs — allegations the companies repeatedly and collectively denied for months while expressing outrage and calling for reform.
GoDaddy has reportedly been preparing its initial public offering as of March, and could go public as early as 2014.