Protecting Users and Customers Everywhere
The online world has become a cornerstone of global society, important to virtually every aspect of our public infrastructure and private lives. As we look to the future, new online technologies will do even more to help address important societal challenges, from improving education and healthcare to advancing agriculture, business growth, job creation, and addressing environmental sustainability. Recent events, however, have put online security at risk. Malicious actors, with motives ranging from criminal to geopolitical, have inflicted economic harm, put human lives at risk, and undermined the trust that is essential to an open, free, and secure internet. Attacks on the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of data, products, services, and networks have demonstrated the need for constant vigilance, collective action, and a renewed commitment to cybersecurity.
Protecting our online environment is in everyone’s interest. Therefore we – as enterprises that create and operate online technologies – promise to defend and advance its benefits for society. Moreover, we commit to act responsibly, to protect and empower our users and customers, and thereby to improve the security, stability, and resilience of cyberspace.
To this end, we are adopting this Accord and the principles below:
1. WE WILL PROTECT ALL OF OUR USERS AND CUSTOMERS EVERYWHERE.
- We will strive to protect all our users and customers from cyberattacks – whether an individual, organization or government – irrespective of their technical acumen, culture or location, or the motives of the attacker, whether criminal or geopolitical.
- We will design, develop, and deliver products and services that prioritize security, privacy, integrity and reliability, and in turn reduce the likelihood, frequency, exploitability, and severity of vulnerabilities.
2. WE WILL OPPOSE CYBERATTACKS ON INNOCENT CITIZENS AND ENTERPRISES FROM ANYWHERE.
- We will protect against tampering with and exploitation of technology products and services during their development, design, distribution and use.
- We will not help governments launch cyberattacks against innocent citizens and enterprises from anywhere.
3. WE WILL HELP EMPOWER USERS, CUSTOMERS AND DEVELOPERS TO STRENGTHEN CYBERSECURITY PROTECTION.
- We will provide our users, customers and the wider developer ecosystem with information and tools that enable them to understand current and future threats and protect themselves against them.
- We will support civil society, governments and international organizations in their efforts to advance security in cyberspace and to build cybersecurity capacity in developed and emerging economies alike.
4. WE WILL PARTNER WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH LIKEMINDED GROUPS TO ENHANCE CYBERSECURITY.
- We will work with each other and will establish formal and informal partnerships with industry, civil society, and security researchers, across proprietary and open source technologies to improve technical collaboration, coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and threat sharing, as well as to minimize the levels of malicious code being introduced into cyberspace.
- We will encourage global information sharing and civilian efforts to identify, prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and ensure flexible responses to security of the wider global technology ecosystem.
To ensure a meaningful partnership is established through the implementation of the Tech Accord, we, the undersigned companies, will continue to define collaborative activities we will undertake to further this Accord. We will also report publicly on our progress in achieving these goals.