It's not like everyone at Google is reading my email. No privacy intrusion here IMHO.
Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
121–130 of 178 posts
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Creepiness"? Are you a child? You seem to comprehend how Google runs its business and pays for its services. Isn't it incredibly ludicrous to call it creepy?
No, reading personal email to deliver advertisements is creepy. It's better than it used to be but we all remember seeing things like casket advertisements when an email mentioned dead code, etc etc. It's creepy, and I would gladly pay google monthly to prevent them from abusing my privacy. But Google doesn't want money from me, it wants to abuse my privacy. That's far more profitable. It's unfortunate but too many s…
> It's creepy, and I would gladly pay google monthly to prevent them from abusing my privacy.
OK..... how about $5/mo for Google Apps for business? They say ads can be disabled.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#123Microsoft has trotted their old friend "Get The Facts" out again! Back in the 2000s, they ran a very long anti-Linux campaign under the "Get The Facts" banner. Under this program they paid for many dubious "Total Cost of Ownership" studies, all of which found that Microsoft products were cheaper than those based on Linux. It was a PR disaster for Microsoft as far as the geek community was concerned and they eventuall…
This is probably going to be a bit more effective, email is bit less "geek" centric and far more mainstream. This type of PR/Shit talk looks more like a political campaign, so I imagine it will be very effective in the consumer market.
I think most people don't give a flying frak about Google "reading" their emails.
The only people it could be effective again are the ones spending time on HN, /., etc. who value their privacy.
Heck, I'm using Google and Google Docs for nearly everything and I don't give a crap about their tiny text ads related to what I write in my emails.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is perhaps a better link: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html In general Google Apps is a great product for small-medium sized businesses. As is Office 365.
Google is horrible for a company's IT security team though. Very difficult to lock things down from a firewall level when Google won't tell you the IP addresses individual apps run on (say if I want to allow Google Hangouts but not Chrome Remote Desktop), and some of their apps won't work properly through a proxy or VPN. There's enough cases where Google has been unable/unwilling to help configure that someone could…
"You are doing it wrong".
You do not lock the apps by IP, because they run on many different machines in different data centers. What is running on specific machine is dynamic, based on momentary requirements.
If you do not want to allow Google Hangouts, use your administrator console.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#125This is embarassingly sloppy, but I agree with the kernel of the message. Microsoft says Google "goes through" your email to target ads, whereas outlook.com only "scans" your email for spam filtering. This is a valid contrast, destroyed by the bullshit phrasing. The important difference for me is that spam filter criteria are common to 99% of all recipients. My personal set (if google even has personal blacklists) is…
The notion of storing my mail spool on anyone else's servers is unfathomably derelict to me. I recognize that I'm in the minority here.
I'm in the same minority.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#126If your emails are in plaintext the email host can always read/scan your stuff.
If that bothers you, use PGP.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#127What I dont get is, how is a software scanning my email creepy? As it everyone scans every bloody email to seek out spam. Spam filters already use "known" spam styles to check for potential spam messages. In this case they are scanning to show you ads. Pardon me if I am missing something, but I really don't understand wtf is wrong with people calling this creepy.
More precisely, they are scanning in an attempt to improve the relevance of the ads.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#128Microsoft has lost it. If "scanning email" is their only concern, they're doing it too, for the purpose of "prioritizing my privacy" or whatever. I don't get it why people make a big deal out of all this. As long as private emails are not being read by real people, I doubt most people (who know what "scanning email" is) care.
There's a difference. Microsoft is doing malware scanning, which does mean they access message content, but not in a way that is meaningful to privacy. Google is scanning and indexing your material. They are using that index to build a dossier on you, and they are measuring the accuracy of that dossier by evaluating your responses to ads and content fed to you.
I'm not sure about that. I think that serving relevant ads for emails doesn't need to associate the person with the email with the ad. Or does it? I guess when you open an email, they just extract the keywords out of it, and then run a search against their ads index to serve relevant ads. If that's the case, I don't think extracting keywords from email is different from scanning it against malware.
Besides, building an index is just necessary for providing email search. I'm sure outlook mail does that too, if their search is any good. I haven't used it, so I don't know.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#129Microsoft has lost it. If "scanning email" is their only concern, they're doing it too, for the purpose of "prioritizing my privacy" or whatever. I don't get it why people make a big deal out of all this. As long as private emails are not being read by real people, I doubt most people (who know what "scanning email" is) care.
If you have 15 minutes, Cory Doctrow wrote a great short story called Scroogled[1], that presents a possibly scary future and highlights potential risks with email scanning.
It is science fiction but it is interesting to ponder.
Re: Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.
#130What I dont get is, how is a software scanning my email creepy? As it everyone scans every bloody email to seek out spam. Spam filters already use "known" spam styles to check for potential spam messages. In this case they are scanning to show you ads. Pardon me if I am missing something, but I really don't understand wtf is wrong with people calling this creepy.
Well believe it or not but some people don't like the idea of targeted ads, which is the result of Google's scanning. Small anecdote, when my 66 year old father found out that a grocery store chain was sending him "personal deals" based on what he had bought using their card he immediately went home and cut it. He thought (and thinks) that no one should be keeping tabs on his buying patterns for commercial purposes, even though he might stand to gain from it. I was kind of suprised by his harsch reaction at first but later I was actually kind of proud of the fact that he cared so much about his personal privacy and integrity. This might seem shocking to the "web generation" but I think it can be a quite healthy and refreshing mindset sometimes.
On a personal note I have taken an interest in Xamarin's stuff lately and since Google is the all-seeing-eye of the web that means I now see Xamarin ads wherever I go (those not caught by adblock that is). Maybe I should care more as well, the more I think of it the less ok it feels.