> To say that Microsoft accessing one account based on evidence in order to gather more evidence for a civil suit - with explicit permission granted by the user

> To say that Microsoft accessing one account based on evidence in order to gather more evidence for a civil suit - with explicit permission granted by the user during signup - is equivalent to Google's behavior is just blatantly wrong. You are correct that the comparison is blatantly wrong. What Microsoft did is evil and a massive, massive violation of privacy and trust. What Google does can't even be classified as evil. Arguably it's creepy, but that's about the extent of it, and they have been clear about it from the start. And bullshit on the "explicit permission" part. No where did anybody get a clear "you grant Microsoft the right to read your email whenever they bloody well want to if it suits an internal investigation with zero oversight" checkbox. > Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users This is incorrect, as the word "read" requires some amount of comprehension. The automatic indexing algorithm has no comprehension of what it is scanning, ergo there is no "reading" going on.