Brad Smith, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at Microsoft, addressed the NSA scandal during an interview with HuffPost Live at Davos.
"Three things are going to need to happen," Smith said when asked about a recovery of trust after the NSA scandal.
Smith said government needs to take steps to restore trust with citizens, and said President Barack Obama's recent speech kicked off that effort. Smith also said companies need to restore trust by taking steps to reassure customers they have privacy.
As for the third step, Smith said "we're going to need a level of international collaboration that goes beyond what we've seen."
Smith said the relationship between business and government has a few different dimensions that usually exist at the same time.
"The government defines the laws and we comply with them," Smith said. "There may be times we think the government goes too far and we challenge them... there are times when we work together. There are times when the government is our customer."
Smith blogged about the topic at HuffPost earlier this week. You can read that here.
See Smith's interview above, and read more from Davos below: