3 ms·
Microsoft 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
by siddhant 14y ago
Microsoft 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.
- Skoofoo 14y agoAgreed. It's annoying how Microsoft misleads the reader into thinking that they personally look through every email.
- Spooky23 14y agoThere'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.
- siddhant 14y agoI'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.
- jnorthrop 14y agoIf 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. [1]http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html