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Comment by throwawaykf03 | Hacker News Reader

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throwawaykf03·

Read both sides of the story rather than just Google's accusations:

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...

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"Google alleges that Bing monitors what people search for on its site, if they have Internet Explorer equipped with certain features. Bing doesn’t dispute this. But Bing isn’t just monitoring what happens at Google. It monitors what people do as they travel across the entire web."

I'd love to see that on the Scroogled page.

(I recognize that on the internet I have basically no privacy from people who want to extract useful signals from my behavior. It sounds icky but in practice it doesn't seem to be a problem and it's a huge pain to prohibit. What bothers me is Microsoft pretending to be pro-privacy and anti-tracking when it does the same kind of data collection and mining as everyone else.)

Users have to opt in to sharing click events with Bing for features like suggested sites ("if they have Internet Explorer equipped with certain features"), and that's what they track. IMO, if users give permission, it's fair game for MS to use that data -- that's still more of an option than what most of the Internet gives users.

Also, AFAIK Hotmail (or live or outlook or whatever it's called now) does not, and never has, targeted ads based on keywords in the email. I'm not that big on privacy so I still use Gmail but at least MS is not being hypocritical in that respect.

Bing search, on the other hand, does all the sorts of tracking and mining Google (and Facebook etc.) does, but so far the Scroogled campaign hasn't said anything about search.

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