Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

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If you login to Outlook.com (which is extremely slow btw), you'll also find the following settings page available from the bottom right cog icon: https://data.choice.microsoft.com/mydata/UserInterests

Under 'My Data' it stores Bing Searches and takes guesses as to your 'Interests'. How does it do that exactly? Operationally, how different is Outlook.com a.k.a Hotmail, compared to Google? Both are free, and nothing is for free in this world. So, Microsoft also have an angle.

Digging further you'll find information on Microsoft Advertising, which is something I don't remember actively opting in to, but I appear to be registered for: https://data.choice.microsoft.com/MyChoices/MSAdvertising

It states, and I quote:

> About Microsoft Advertising

> With the Microsoft Personal Data Dashboard (beta), you can choose not to receive personalized ads on websites that use the Microsoft Advertising Platform by not allowing Microsoft Advertising to use your information.

> Information used by Microsoft Advertising

> The Microsoft Advertising Platform customizes personalized ads based on different types of information, including but not limited to:

> Bing searches

> Interests

> Profile

> What does it mean not to allow Microsoft Advertising to use your information?

> Well, first, it doesn't mean you will stop getting ads or see fewer ads; but, it does mean that the ads you get won't be personalized anymore by Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft will continue to collect information for other uses, such as delivering content that is personalized for you; for example, the news articles displayed on MSN and the results you get when you search for software updates.

I guess, at least I can opt-out. Google doesn't allow me to opt-out of their creepiness. Saying that though, even though GMail creeps me out, but I'm addicted to the user interface.

Logging in to Gmail is slower than Outlook in my experience, it even got a loading bar. I got IE9 right now so I can't test it (I'm not at my own pc), but this is how it feels to me.

You may have a point. I use Chrome predominantly. It might well be that Google optimize GMail for Chrome and Microsoft optimize Hotmail/Outlook.com for IE.

"You can also opt-out of getting personalized ads from advertising companies other than Microsoft, on the Consumer Choice page.":

http://www.aboutads.info/choices/

Personalized ads is not an issue.

Excessive and invasive email scanning and analysis is.

It's really a bait-n-switch technique. They are substituting a bigger and more important issue with something tactile but of a superficial value. "Your tumor hurts? We have a Tylenol for that."

"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?

Creepiness is the term used by Google (Eric Schmidt) and repeated by Microsoft in the linked website.

Here's the source:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/animation...

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 services point to my gmail for me to be able to switch.

Let's define what "read" means in this context. A computer program, most likely a C++ binary, takes the string of your emails, splits on U+0020 and sends the resulting array through a series of algorithms like Levenshtein distance to match to its database of ads.

Text mining has come a long way since 1985, so I don't think that's how it's done (in fact I know it's not done that way), but I guess what you mean is that no human ever looks at the data. That's possible, but not reassuring.

Many of the shady purposes this data could be misused for don't require a human to ever read it. Say, one day, that C++ binary computes a score that indicates how reliable, credit worthy, dangerous, healthy, honest or skilled you are.

Say another C++ binary makes a decision that influences your life based on such a score. A decision on health insurance, banking, job applications, security matters, etc. Is that better, just because no human ever looked at the data and giggled because you searched for some embarrassing disease?

But what business sense does it make for Google to sell the data directly? You can only sell data once; targeted advertising can be sold over and over again.

It could make business sense for someone like Google or LinkedIn or Facebook to provide a service to employers to score job applicants in terms of loyalty, skill, reliability, security risk or whatever. It could make business sense for Google to provide credit risk scoring to banks or lifestyle/health related scoring to health insurance companies. They would not have sell our personal data to do that. They would just compute scores.

Granted it would not make business sense for Google to do that right now. But the future might look very differently. What about a desperate future Google that has been deprived of ad income by regulation happy governments or threatened by anti-trust legislation? What about a Google disrupted and superseded by some other new and cool company, lead by someone put in place by activist investors to monetize its assets?

Things change, but our ability to react to such changes is very limited when it comes to taking back information that has been put out there.

No, but that's a separate problem from algorithmic ads. When Google shares personal data and not merely statistics about personal data I'll being doing the call-to-arms along side you. What Microsoft wants you to think, however, is that there is an office full of people some where reading your emails and picking ads that they think you might respond to.

Some would say that sharing a computed score that claims to say something about me is not sharing my personal data. But I don't even think that Google would compute and sell such a score at this point in time. I trust them to some degree, maybe even a bit more than I trust others.

What I'm concerned about is that data that allows such a score to be computed is out there and I have no way to control it or take it back. Google could change and start to interpret their privacy policy slightly differently. The data could be stolen or accessed by governments. Many things could happen that are outside of my control.

But I agree that Microsoft may try to insinuate something different from what I'm concerend about.

> 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.

> It's unfortunate but too many services point to my gmail for me to be able to switch.

One at a time. In a few weeks or months, you'll be done. The point isn't to redirect all email away from Gmail, but to starve it for usable content.

You can check multiple mailboxes for as long a transition period as you need. Maybe in perpetuity.

Right here https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...

So, make a brand new email address and abandon my @gmail account?

If I was willing to do that: I'd just leave Gmail for a superior service!

Superior in what way? No one has better spam blocking.

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