Scroogle(d) by Microsoft

"Uses words from your sent and received email messages to display targeted ads." I like this, I prefer relevant ads to irrelevant ones.

"Scans the content of your entire inbox to identify themes and trends for ad targeting." Again great stuff, give me relevant ads, not spam. And it's anonymised and not read by real people, so no privacy issues occur. Plus I'm not up to no good, so I really could not care less.

"Uses words from email messages sent to you from other email service providers to display ads—regardless of whether the sender has given permission to your email service provider to scan his or her message." Okay now we're flogging a dead horse here. There is no problem with this! You host your emails on their service, the content of your emails goes through them. Being selective about how they handle your data when that handling improves their quality of service is incredibly dumb.

The Scroogled campaign is just a poor attempt at pandering to people's paranoia and ignorance through shallow fallacies.

Plus there are other options out there besides Gmail and Outlook. Microsoft naturally won't be fairly representing the alternatives now will they? NOPE. The Scroogled campaign really rustles my feathers, I dislike it intensely when a company specifically targets and libels a competitor. Focus on your strengths, don't invent your opponents weaknesses. It's childish and immature, a bad image to portray to a prospective client.

This has only been posted about 1000 times on HN. Posting it more than that won't make Microsoft's campaign any less crappy.