Mention “Ma Bell” in the presence of any aging Baby Boomer, and you’re sure to get at the very least a knowing roll of the eyes. It was the pop culture label slapped onto the gargantuan American Bell Telephone Company, which pretty much monopolized telecommunications in the United States from 1877 until the behemoth was broken up in 1984 as a result of a 1974 antitrust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice.

That phrase, “Ma Bell,” was less a condemnation of government-sanctioned monopoly than it was an expression of how consumers perceived the telephone company thought of them. It was Mother knows best, which meant, Sit down, shut up, and pay your phone bill. If you don’t like it, find another phone company. Did Ma Bell care what people thought? The answer is another question: Why should it have? For more than a century, “find another phone company” meant fetch a pair of tin cans and a ball of twine.

Times and technologies have changed, and by orders of magnitude.

Recently, reporter Mark Hachman posted a ReadWriteWeb blog provocatively—and accurately—titled “Microsoft Sneaks Out New Privacy Policy.” He commented on the fact that Microsoft distributed its latest Services Agreement “to consumers the Friday night before the Labor Day holiday,” when relatively few people would take notice of it. The agreement governs users of virtually all of Microsoft’s consumer online services, giving consumers ostensibly the same choice Ma Bell gave its parishioners where it comes to privacy: If you don’t like it, find another email client, web-based mail service, cloud service, messaging service, search engine, and online office suite. Of course, there is one critical difference between Ma Bell and Microsoft. Between 1877 and 1984, there was effectively no other phone company. Today, Microsoft competes with many others in the various online markets it seeks to dominate.

Further, unlike monopolistic Ma Bell, Microsoft is far from dominating many of the markets it covets. In “sneaking in” a new privacy policy and telling consumers to take it or leave it, Microsoft is acting like what it by no means is, the incumbent in these markets, instead of what it needs to be: the underdog contender—the insurgent who will do anything to earn the trust and loyalty of consumers, who will give consumers choice instead of forcing it on them, who will provide them with transparency and cede to them control.

Privacy policy? Don’t sneak it before the public on the Friday before a holiday. Proclaim it, sell it, promote it, advertise it—but first make sure you’ve crafted it as a genuinely valuable product benefit that sets your merchandise significantly above what the others offer. History’s successful revolutions have all been the work of insurgents who won their power—their dominant market share—specifically by ceding power to the people: their consumers.

It all begins by caring about what consumers think. And for that reason, even as Microsoft deploys policies and technologies to empower and enable it to know what we think, we respectfully ask: Does Microsoft care what we think?