MS Targets Google With Another Smear Campaign 513
walterbyrd writes with news that Microsoft's PR department has started a campaign to convince Gmail users that Google reads your personal emails, referring to Google's automated method of scanning emails for keywords to generate supposedly relevant advertising.
"The gist of the scare campaign is that Google is a scary, scary company that reads your private emails in order to send you targeted ads. 'Even if you don't use Gmail, if you send email to someone who does, Google goes through those emails to generate advertising revenue too,' Microsoft warns in material sent to reporters. Oh, and Microsoft points out that six class-action lawsuits have been filed against Google over this issue, and asks people to sign a petition 'to tell Google to stop going through your personal email messages.'"
Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:2)
Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I care, it's a post-privacy society, get over it.
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Then create a /. account with your REAL NAME and post here.
Don't be silly. No-one would ever do that!
Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably that Google and Microsoft resemble each other in many substantive ways, including a declining respect for user privacy.
Google can get away with it, because they're our favorite company around here. If Microsoft did the same thing there'd be a 1000 post thread here about it.
Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft actually does the exact same thing. So where is the 1000 post thread about it?
Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:5, Insightful)
In the states, our foremost vital constitutional right is that of free speech, which means you can say that your competition sucks if you like. Or not say it. Or say yours is great. Or say both. Or neither.
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Gee, another *child* responds to the European. For your information, *kiddie*, that didn't used to happen on broadcast TV or radio 30 years or so ago here in the US, either.
mark
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What kind of fucked up ambiguous, selective, and arbitrary system of oppression do you have over there?
One where corporations don't get absolute free rein to pollute our minds with all kinds of ambiguous, selective, arbitrary and oppressive bullshit.
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Re:Saw an ad on ABC last night with my wife (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, and we all have a "sex inspector" that goes to every house and takes notes. If we don't have enough quality sex, we'll receive "death points". These will be taken into account by the death panels when they decide if we're entitled to medical treatment in a public hospital.
But don't worry, we have plenty of time to watch TV during our 6 month vacation. And we spend the rest of the year on strike, so we get to watch a lot of it. It's just that we don't have Cheetos and Budwiser while watching TV. Instead we have goat cheese and red wine.
Re:semantic analysis in the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Google might even change it's policy and let humans read your e-mails.
So might Microsoft in their cloud hosting service! ...Your point?
You gave them permission. How do do you know what google will do int he next ten years?
Once again you gave the same permission to Microsoft, specifically the clause that lets them change TOS at will with your only recourse being to stop using the service.
Maybe some credit agency will pay them $100 per user account to see all your e-mails.
Mean while microsoft is actually promising in their user agreement that they will never ever do that to you. There's thus a big difference.
Of course, that same user agreement also give Microsoft the option of changing those rules at their convenience, and the burden is on you to discover the change, not on them to reveal it.
Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it a "Smear Campaign" if it's true?
Pretty "slanted" summary, but I guess this is Slashdot and the story is about Microsoft.
Now, who's more evil? Google or Microsoft? Hard to tell around here sometimes...
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I'd rather non-invasive and targeted ads, than the annoying (and presumably irrelevant if MS aren't being hypocritical here) animated ones that you got on MSN, and now get on Skype.
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Why would you want ads when reading your email at all? This seems to be horrible mental gymnastics to try to maintain "Google good!" fanboism.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it's funny how people will apparently put thought into the question "given the choice, would you rather we cut off your arm or cut off your leg?" without considering that perhaps a third option is infinitely preferable.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are you saying it shouldn't be that EITHER and it should be 100% free because you're entitled?
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then get off his lazy ass and build it.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
Kind of a forced scenario there. Why can't we have good e-mail without advertisements as an option? Google's service is fine, and understanding their ToS means you understand you're going to have ads; that's the nature of the net right now. Doesn't mean you have to like it and that we must comply with this model.
GMail supports IMAP. Which doesn't have ads.
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Well, as I run adblock I don't actually get any anywhere - I'm just saying that Google are IMO much better than MS when it comes to advertising.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want ads when reading your email at all?
I don't want, them, but I am willing to accept them because I am an adult, and I know that there is no Santa Claus. Corporations don't provide services out of the goodness of their heart. The ads pay for the "free" email, and also help pay for Google's research into autonomous vehicles, improved search technology, etc. So I accept them, occasionally click on them, and sometimes even buy something.
This seems to be horrible mental gymnastics to try to maintain "Google good!" fanboism.
Expecting something for nothing is being childish. Grow up.
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No one said anything about Google not being able to use advertising to offset the cost of providing a free service. What the grown ups are talking about is Google's ne
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
You can pay for paid Google services that don't include ads.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/ [google.com]
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A little misdirection? The issue wasn't the advertising itself but Google reading/scanning personal email to create targeted ads.
Does Google still scan your email for keywords even though they may not immediately show you advertising? Just because they don't show you the ads while reading email doesn't mean they can't use the information gathered to target the ads you view while browsing.
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A machine knows that "dishwasher" is related to "dishware" because somewhere there is a huge table that defines this. It does not know that you are calling your friend Joe a "dishwasher" because he's the one that does the dishes in your house, which is why you'll see ads for Corell dishware, and not part-time work in restaurants.
If this was a joke then I'm sorry, this has been a long
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I don't see any ads on the web. Ever.
Noscript + Adblock. My brain is grateful.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Google gets my trust because it allows me to export data from their services - like Google Docs. Because they give me free stuff that I don't have to pay for. If the consequences are that I get more targeted ads instead of untargeted ones...oh the horror! I like them because I have an inexpensive Nexus 4 instead of an overpriced iOS product. I love them because of the cheap and fast Internet they're rolling out in Kansas. Need I go on?
I can say with 100% confidence that my life is better due to Google. And I don't have to pay a thing. I've never been inconvenienced. For that, I love them. I know they don't sell my data to anyone because they'd be fools to do so. And I know they have the utmost incentive to not let it leak out to anyone else.
The day I find myself inconvenienced by Google is the day I lose my trust in them. But till that happens, they get the benefit of the doubt.
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I'd rather non-invasive and targeted ads
I wouldn't. Seriously. Say your wife has a chat while you're reading your email and the ads are full of requests from hot teenage cam girls to get jiggy with them, it's much easier if you can just call it general spam.
Gmail users are suppliers, not products (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. I am the supplier of the inputs for the product that is being packaged by Google and sold to advertisers, and Gmail is (one of many parts of) the payment Google provides to me in return for providing those inputs.
If I am not satisfied that the payment is sufficient value for what Google is asking in exchange, I stop providing the inputs and reject the payment.
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No, the main inputs are information and an information channel back for displaying ads (both are critically important to Google's ability to sell advertising -- the information is useless for selling ads without the advertising channel, and the channel has value even without the additional information, which is why less-targeted ads are still sold on the internet.)
No, I don't sell pri
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Funny)
Now, who's more evil? Google or Microsoft?
Apple
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
Is it a "Smear Campaign" if it's true?
That's a big "if." In this case it isn't true: "Reading" implies a "person reading your email." Google parses email to place ads. But so what? So does Microsoft and every other Email provider on earth. They may be parsing it for a different reason, but they are doing the exact same thing. If parsing is "reading" then you'd have a point. But it isn't, so you don't. Parsing != to Reading. Or, to put it another way: If Google is "reading your email" at Gmail so is Microsoft at Office 365 Online, because all spam protection services parse email and microsoft advertises their Office 365 service as including excellent "Microsoft Forefront" security.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Informative)
My email providers don't. They don't because I pay them a small fee for the service.
"Read" doesn't imply a person. It's quite clear in the summary what is meant. MS is certainly being hypocritical, but that doesn't mean Google is a good guy.
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My email providers don't.
Really? Are you aware that SMTP transactions are, at heart, a parsing of your message? That an automated program is parsing through the message to figure out where the headers end and the body begins? To do this they must parse the message.
So if they're not parsing your email, how is it being delivered? Osmosis? Telepathy? Carrier pigeon?
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it does not.
In this context it clearly is intended to imply a person is reading it: The advertisement and smear campaign aren't related to "linux manuals pages"--it is directed at an audience that would unquestionably infer that their messages were being "read" by a person.
It's a disingenuous lie to say they're being "read" by a person because they aren't. It is even more disingenuous because what Google is doing is "parsing" the messages, not reading them, and achieves galactic levels of hypocrisy when you realize Microsoft's cloud services parse your email too.
A Smear Campaign Is a Smear Campaign (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it a "Smear Campaign" if it's true?
Well, it's not entirely true. I think most people consider the definition of reading to mean "looked" at [wiktionary.org] and that it is implicitly a human that is reading your e-mail in this case. The eyes superimposed in the first video imply this. What's actually happening is that your e-mail is being loaded into memory and parsed to build an index associated with some key that is associated with you and that is being stored. This data is then used to serve targeted ads. Do you really think that a person is involved at any point so far? Do you really think there's a Google employee looking over raw table data and rubbing one out when he sees that "ky jelly" is associated with user 57234765235 at a rate of 0.0054% of the time with a high precision value? Really? Show me a mail service provider that neither loads your e-mail into memory (alias "reads" it) nor stores it in a database and I'll show you extraterrestrial beings.
Pretty "slanted" summary, but I guess this is Slashdot and the story is about Microsoft.
Really? Where are Google's commercials of equal proportions? I guarantee you they would make for a story just like this.
Now, who's more evil? Google or Microsoft? Hard to tell around here sometimes...
Just because one evil is smearing another evil of less, equal or greater proportions doesn't make it not a smear campaign! This is exactly what it is! Disingenuous advertising meant to unduly spread uncertainty and deceit! How does Microsoft detect spam? The same damn way!
Re:A Smear Campaign Is a Smear Campaign (Score:4, Informative)
Prying into? Do you mean seeing what web pages you were hitting and such? That's nothing short of bullshit.
They drove around and saw how many wireless networks there were and wrote down ESSIDs, the publicly broadcasted name of the network.
So they collected publicly broadcasted data at the same time they were rumored to be considering launching a wireless internet service to see how feasible it was.
They were asked if someone had an unsecured wireless network, and if they were typing passwords on an unsecured website at the same time that someone was network sniffing, would it be possible for someone to see that data and Google said yes. People didn't understand what that meant and misinterpreted it (or intentionally twisted it) to portray snooping, when responsible journalists should be educating people.
Secure your wifi, and never input sensitive data into a website that isn't using SSL.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
MS reads everything on your sky-net drive. Supposenly to their fair use rules. However if there is something bad on them you loose your account. (even if that that data is never shared)
Now who is evil....
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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It IS a smear campaign... (Score:2, Insightful)
It IS a smear campaign. Tech Crunch and Read Write are trying to smear Microsoft for pointing out the truth.
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yeah? Let me know how that fairsearch campaign is working out for Microsoft. You know, google is evil blah blah.
Also remind me how people respond to hotmail selling your information to anyone and everyone, including signing you up for spam mail. While google does do advertising, they don't sign you up for product spam.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you think automated parsing of an email to target ads is "reading your private emails"? If so, do you also think that a spam filter running on the mail server "reads your private emails"?
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft suggests that Google employees are actively reading your mail, which is not true.
Software sifts through the mail to automate ads based upon context. No one at Google is actually looking at your private data.
Microsoft's Outlook.com has contextual ads as well. Telling people that Outlook is somehow better than Gmail in this regard is nothing short of a lie.
It should also be noted that Google has fought governments to protect private data from their users. But Microsoft handed over IP addresses tied to search terms to the government without a warrant. They have a patent on how to best sell your private data to third parties via auction. Microsoft's track record on privacy is pretty poor for them to start throwing stones.
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Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Informative)
> Google DOES read your email, and we learned from the Patreus affair that access to that email is handed over without a warrant as well.
> Are we living in a police state yet?
Equating the two is about as disingenuous as the MS campaign, and painting Google as the state patsy in comparison to MS is equally dishonest.
First, showing contextual ads based on e-mails and handing over e-mails to the state have nothing to do with each other. MS hands over e-mails to - the only difference is that they don't fight against it.
Google fighting against state censorship in China and against invasion of privacy in the U.S. probably doesn't go far enough for you, but MS doesn't fight against them at all. In fact, when Google was fighting China, MS say it as an opportunity to gain some market share by agreeing to do the stuff that Google was fighting.
Re: Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone who uses the word "fanbois" should be sterilized and permanently segregated from society.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Funny)
agreed.
Google DOES read your email, and we learned from the Patreus affair that access to that email is handed over without a warrant as well.
Are we living in a police state yet?
First they came for the generals.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Google employees weren't reading the email. The US government now has a stupid law that when a law enforcement agency requests email, companies are required to hand it over without a warrant. That didn't mean anyone from Google was reading it ahead of time.
Someone should contest this (along with warantless wiretapping, GPS tracking, etc) to the Supreme Court because this behavior should be unconstitutional. Blame the executive branch for massively overstepping their authority.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
As a company policy, they weren't. Anyone who did was fired. Microsoft is claiming that it is Google's official policy to have employees read your email.
I would hope you can understand the distinction.
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Speaking of "Smear Campaigns"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then are they charging for email service, or do they give it away out of the goodness of their soul?** If they're giving it away, what is their motive? Or do their stockholders feel it is a good thing to spend capital resources to provide the public a free service for no benefit?
**does Microsoft have a soul? If so, is it powered by
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWbq5GHXPhA [youtube.com]
Bob Saget raped and killed a girl in 1990.
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MS was caught [techrights.org] using third world countries to stack ISO committees with their supporters to help them ram a very flawed [robweir.com] standard through an ISO approval process.
Where's the lie? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
It's Quite Disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
I think it's more than a bit disingenuous because the video has this person's eyes superimposed over your e-mail while mischievous music plays in the background. We all know that it's not a person reading the e-mails, it's software doing latent semantic indexing or some such algorithm.
They might not be lying but they are deceiving. Tell me how my Hotmail knows how to classify incoming e-mails as spam again? OH! You're running a Bayesian classification algorithm and building word statistics out of my e-mail?! They're reading my e-mails! Cue judging eyeballs over my e-mail with corny music.
Note: I'm not defending Google but I'm pretty sure that some type of software runs some sort of algorithm on your e-mails if you go through any reputable major e-mail provider. Hell, my debian postfix server is attached to a bunch of algorithmic open source programs to do just that!
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The big difference between scanning for spam and scanning to place ads is that scanning for spam benefits me, and scanning for ads is for Google's benefit.
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Scanning for ads pays for the service. Ad-Supported. Scanning for ads means you get an email service, for free. Spam filtering, for free. You get multi-gigabytes of storage, for free. So how in the heck can any Gmail user say it benefits Google and not them also?
It's legitimate for a non Gmail user to say that having their mail scanned isn't isn't worth the value of the email service. If you do have Gmail, you made the deal and you can leave any time if not happy with what you perceive as value you
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Well, I am not a gmail user for precisely this reason.
Also, Google is not scanning for ads in order to provide you with free email service, they are providing free email service in order to be able to show you ads. The 'free email' is just a cost of doing business - the selling of ads is worth much more than that expense.
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I think it's more than a bit disingenuous because the video has this person's eyes superimposed over your e-mail while mischievous music plays in the background. We all know that it's not a person reading the e-mails, it's software doing latent semantic indexing or some such algorithm.
Do you really believe that Google NEVER assigns a human set of eyes to review emails - even when they're trying to better tune their ad-targeting algorithms?
Re:It's Quite Disingenuous (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I believe it.
You know why? Because they can use internal emails or just test data to tune their algorithms. Promising not to actual read your emails and then lying about it would literally threaten their entire business model. Why take such a risk that could destroy your company? That would be monumentally stupid.
I don't think Google is that stupid.
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I mostly agree with you but I'd imagine when tuning their algorithms, ie all the time, they have to look at individual emails and see if a manual person would come to the same conclusion that their bot does. They might just test it with their own corporate mail, or have some sort of anonymizing layer that processes the messages first but at some level any mail service will have a IT guy looking at actual messages occasionally. When you are running a separate business process off of the mail you have more re
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Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
The funny thing is, MSFT seems to be guilty of the same. Check out: http://investigativerep.blogspot.com/2013/02/microsoft-bing-botched-runs-google.html [blogspot.com]
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What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
What I'd like from GOOG: a guarantee (legal contract) that GOOG will continue to read my email to improve the spam filtering I so greatly enjoy, and (statistically) improve advertising revenue so I can get that spam-filtering email service free of charge.
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Outlook.com is pretty slick too. For all the gmail users out there worth getting a burner account just to give it a try. I still use gmail as my primary and outlook as my burner but for better or worse MS did a great job giving the Win 8 look and feel to a webmail solution.
It is a matter of business model I think: MS makes money by selling software. Google makes money by selling ads. Both will do whatever steers you towards their profit centres: Google is much more heavily benefited by having detailed info
Microsoft's solution to the problem? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft's solution to the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
This is just a subset of the basic rule: If a for-profit company is going to a lot of trouble to provide you a free service, the service is not the product, you are the product. Some examples: broadcast media, social networks, and hosted email.
I use neither Gmail nor Hotmail. (Score:4, Informative)
If I did, though, I would of course assume that everything sent via those services was pretty much public (not that anyone would care). But then, unencrypted email is never confidential anyway.
No kiddin' (Score:2, Interesting)
Whenever I use an e-mail service I don't fully own, I assume someone else will eventually read my messages. Frankly, nothing I send out is sensitive or important, or something that can't indirectly be obtained through third party sources.
Maybe I'm weird, but I listen to my gut feeling that tells me Google is more trustworthy than Microsoft.
So. My work e-mail can be read by my employer (I know that for a fact) and is automatically scanned for sensitive words, especially if I send e-mails to external addresse
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Between this PC and Google's servers, there sit 11 other 'computers'. The first 6 belong to my ISP. The last 5 Google.
That's 11 I have no control over.
Read away, my anonymous computers, read away.
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Between this PC and Google's servers, there sit 11 other 'computers'. The first 6 belong to my ISP. The last 5 Google.
And from there, to other destinations, there may be 20 more hops, all of which you don't control, in other countries where the laws aren't the same as the one you're in.
An email is a postcard. Unless you encrypt the contents, anyone along the way can read it. It used to be impressed upon users that this was the case, and my copy of "Navigating the Internet" from 1994 went through great le
Microsoft Online Privacy? ... (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly the same way that Windows Live Hotmail does it
"We use your information to inform you of other products or services offered by Microsoft and its affiliates, and to send you relevant survey invitations related to Microsoft services." link [microsoft.com]
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Who cares? Boolean opperators are broken. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have recently seen both quotes + and - ignored by google. Seriously WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Google google cheat sheet. If their own operators are no longer working the end is definitely fucking neigh for google as my search engine. I was deeply annoyed when this was happening in froogle (sic) but when MBA bullshit propagates into the search window I am looking else where.
So does anyone have any other options?
Is there a website that tracks google misbehaving?
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(It has already been pointed out that Google moved the old behavior into what they call "Verbatim search", found under "Search tools")
I agree with your sentiment--IMHO this is telling of changes within Google. Geeks drove Google to the top of the search engine precisely
because of the ability to locate only exactly what you want. Apparently within Google the marketers have wrested control from the techies, falling into the "more search results must be better" trap.
Re:Who cares? Boolean opperators are broken. (Score:5, Funny)
...the end is definitely fucking neigh for google
Why? Is someone giving Sergei a pony?
I wonder... (Score:2)
What would happen if I opened an email account with gmail, and sent all ads to an outlook.com account, and viceversa... Would they reach equilibrium, or would the chaos ensue?
Goolge (Score:2)
And Hotmail doesn't? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are we meant to believe Bing isn't crawling Hotmail?
They Deserve It (Score:2)
Everything on the Internet gets scanned by someone (Score:2)
If you want to keep something secret, don't write it down, and best of all, don't email it to someone. Nothing is private on the internet, and if you don't treat the internet like that, then you have only yourself to blame.
If you think otherwise, then you are a fool.
Mark Penn and Chums (Score:2)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/02/08/1516238/ms-targets-google-with-another-smear-campaign [slashdot.org]
Its surprising that we have now entered a world were scum like this get hired instead or competing on innovation and quality. How much further can Microsoft Sink.
Strategic and special projects (Score:2)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battles-google-by-hiring-political-brawler-mark-penn.html?_r=1& [nytimes.com]
If you want to know more details about Microsoft's Head of the pleasant "Strategic and special projects"
Echelon (Score:2)
Pot, meet Kettle (Score:3)
Hmm, hotmail offers spam filtering and also targeted ads. How does Microsoft do that if they aren't "reading" emails the same way Gmail does?
Pot Meet Kettle (Score:5, Informative)
Has anyone looked at the Privacy link at the bottom of the login screen for outlook.com?
http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
Quoting here: "Uses of Information: Additional Details
We use the information we collect to provide the services you request. Our services may include the display of personalized content and advertising.
We use your information to inform you of other products or services offered by Microsoft and its affiliates, and to send you relevant survey invitations related to Microsoft services.
We do not sell, rent, or lease our customer lists to third parties. In order to help provide our services, we occasionally provide information to other companies that work on our behalf."
So they can personalize content and advertising, send you offers, and provide it to other companies.
s/Google Mail/outlook.com/ and the claims appear to be the same.
Best thing Google can do is ignore it (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is experiencing the first stages of a death spiral now that their entry into mobile and tablet markets is a dismal failure and they have done nothing to boost PC enthusiasm. All Microsoft can rely on know is their services, however Bing is now in 5th place for search engines. Hotmail is largely used by people that wanted a second email for stuff they know will spam them, and just converting it to Outlook doesn't make it any less likely people will use it for their primary email.
I really don't care what Google does with a collection of keywords collected in my email. Nobody at Google is personally reading my email, and even so, what of it? Had there been even one single case of a Google employee abusing the information gained from scanning emails to relate to advertising then I could fully back Microsoft's campaign, but its just not the case.
Personally all Microsoft is going to have for customers is a bunch of conspiracy theory nuts and people significant paranoia issues. If this is the kind of user base you want to cultivate by this kind of smear campaign, go right ahead, but I doubt it will save Microsoft in the long run.
The only thing Google should do about this is ignore it. I would rather have a user base of smart rational individuals any day, so let Microsoft bleed the crazies away from Google.
That's funny (Score:3)
Personally, I briefly held a Hotmail address. While I hadn't been using it, my non-obvious, hard to guess address still received a significant amount of spam. It's pretty much a smoking gun that they're sharing things they shouldn't, whether they do something similar with content or not.
Re:I left.... (Score:4, Informative)
Gmail does have two-factor authentication. You can even do it with an app and not have to purchase a dongle.
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