If you are selling military systems, “privacy” does not apply. In the same way if you are selling systems to illegally dump waste for companies, you can hardly claim that this is their “private” matter. It is common in many countries that selling certain chemicals known to be usable for producing illicit drugs or explosives requires the buyer to provide a credible declaration of intended use for a legitimate purpose.

In criminal law, if you are giving tools to commit a crime to someone who you know will commit a crime or is known to commit crimes, you are complicit and you will be charged. Again this has nothing to do with privacy. But even if it is not required, if someone comes into a gun shop, has all the legal requirements and asks the seller how many children can be killed with this or that weapon in 5 minutes, the seller absolutely will be complicit if he stills sells this person a weapon.

Now back to Israel. There is extensive reports about these tools being used to target people in Gaza for killing them. There is reports about these tools being used in a way to maximize the targets selected as “legitimate”, to tweak numbers of “accepted casualities” to allow for more bombing and last but not least with “wheres daddy” to deliberately massacre an entire family of a target instead of only killing that target. This is just blatant murder.

Microsoft has the knowledge about it. They therefore have the duty to stop their complicity. To get back to the school shooter example. It will not be enough for the school shooter to sign a paper that he won’t shoot up a school in the weapons shop. He made his intent clear and it is obvious that he will not be dissuaded by breaking laws.