Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

i'm genuinely curious.

how is that different from gmails privacy policy? do we know anything about googles behavior with law enforcement wrt gmail? even if gmails eula technically allows them to "read"/index all you have in your inbox, does that really legally allow searching for a specific thing? what if there are nlp based triggers?

also while the article deems this ironic:

> In a move that might be deemed ironic, Microsoft will now add its own internal searches to its biannual transparency reports on government surveillance. To top of page

i actually think it's a good idea. does google have anything like this? the real irony is that it reminds me of chinas quarterly human rights report on the united states.

that said i use gmail in spite of hotmail.

by the way, if you want a simple to setup email server, you can use atmail in a kvm. there's a whole host of free solutions, but for those who don't want to fiddle with mail configurations it's worth the 20 bucks

https://atmail.com/

I don't know, but Microsoft made a big deal out of saying they were better than Google with their "Scroogled" campaign.

What Microsoft did here is different from the Google behavior they criticize in multiple ways:

Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users, even in many cases people using paid Google Apps mail unless the administrator has opted out (I've encountered companies that left gmail ads enabled). This means that to a degree, the privacy and security of all your emails is compromised - though we would all hope that Google firewalls that stuff off carefully and ensures that no traces of the mails remain after they're scanned for ad keywords.

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.

Both behaviors may be undesirable, but they are very, very different.

Neither Google nor Microsoft has outright hurt me with their privacy policies in any way I can personally detect.

When it comes to this discussion, for me it's a matter of principles. The principles are being equally violated here, it doesn't matter if one does it more frequently than the other.

So, you agree to what kevingadd wrote.

Of course the emotional appeal that Microsoft was making was that a personified "Google" was poking through your e-mail. It seems very unlikely that they were spending money to make the banal point that the ads one sees on gmail are the result of an algorithm.

In this particular case human beings at Microsoft actually did paw through this individual's e-mail, to his detriment, as was their intent.

At the same time, it seems unlikely that anyone believes that Microsoft was actually advancing a principled criticism in an ad campaign as opposed to merely saying an expedient thing. I doubt that accusations of "hypocrisy" will hurt them, other than making coverage of "scroogled" in the press marginally more disdainful.

It seems very unlikely that they were spending money to make the banal point that the ads one sees on gmail are the result of an algorithm.

There is a fundamental difference. If you promise not to do content-based targeted advertising (as Microsoft claims), you have no interest to collect as much data from a user as possible. If you do content-based advertising, it's in your interest to collect data from as many sources as possible (from e-mails, to locations, to search queries) and combine them.

The latter may not be acceptable to some people.

It is clear (from reading HN) that some people exist who do not find this acceptable.

At the same time, the adoption rates for, say, Facebook show that "nearly everyone" are not actually concerned about such things in practice. There are those who might argue that people should be more concerned. I believe you may find that such conversations have occurred.

Regardless, it seems silly to pretend that Microsoft is making a principled claim, as opposed to mouthing what they hope are scary words.

Similarly, Microsoft isn't actually worried about the plight of young women who may be under the impression that they can pawn their chromebooks to fund a trip to LA.

One thing is collect data, another is scanning all the emails and both of them do that

> If you promise not to do content-based targeted advertising (as Microsoft claims), you have no interest to collect as much data from a user as possible.

False. Microsoft is still hoovering up every scrap of data they can get. They'd be stupid not to, as data is insanely powerful. You don't need much data at all to do targetted advertising, by the way. Seriously, Google uses at most 1% of the data it gets from you for ad-related reasons, if that. No, Google's obsession with data is because data is tremendously powerful at building better products. Microsoft is just shooting themselves in the foot if they aren't doing the exact same thing.

Besides, if you don't want targetted advertising just go turn it off: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/

Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users, even in many cases people using paid Google Apps mail unless the administrator has opted out (I've encountered companies that left gmail ads enabled).

Even when the administrator has switched off ads, e-mails are still mined to show ads in Google services that are not covered under Google Apps:

http://safegov.org/2014/1/31/google-admits-data-mining-stude...

Since Google Apps for Business uses the same privacy policy, there is little reason to believe that anything is different when you are paying $5 per user per month. The privacy policy clearly states that Google can mine your data for ads. Ads can just be turned off for the services covered by Google Apps (but not Google+, Google Maps, Youtube, Google Search, etc.).

I have to add that it's not my intention to bash Google. I actually think their privacy policy is actually readable in comparison to many other services. Also, most other large services don't provide something akin to Google Dashboard.

Just so you're aware, safegov appears to be a Microsoft astrotufing site: http://readwrite.com/2013/01/03/googles-ftc-settlement-is-an... though you can pretty much tell if you just look at their list of articles.

In any case, the article is wrong, on a number of fronts, actually. e.g. the DoubleClick and Google account cookies are never mixed (Google agreed to this in the wake of concerns over the merger, and it's called out explicitly in the Google privacy policy), the statement on Enterprise privacy policies and that testimony about the University of Hawaii don't contradict each other at all, and it's ridiculous to base a whole article on an entry on the University of Alaska's email FAQ. The entry is wrong anyway. Check out the "Data Processing Amendment"[1] that comes with Enterprise/Education accounts, which prohibits processing data in ways that aren't explicitly enumerated in that document. Advertising profiling is not included.

[1] https://www.google.com/intx/en/enterprise/apps/terms/dpa_ter...

> Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users,

Exactly like Microsoft, Apple or Yahoo! does.

I don't know where has started that urban legend that only Google scan the emails, every email provider that does anti spam, auto categorizes or does full text search read all the emails.

> 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.

Evil? Creepy? One of their employees was using hotmail to leak trade secrets. One of their own employees.

That's the reason anybody remotely cares about this. Given that you aren't hosting your own email servers it's a likely possibility that your privacy won't be respected, however in Microsoft's case they had an entire campaign to scare people away from Google and onto their services.

> do we know anything about googles behavior with law enforcement wrt gmail?

Yes, quite a bit: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/

But the problem in this scenario is law enforcement wasn't involved. I'm unaware of any other email hosting company doing this so far. Not to say they haven't, just it hasn't surfaced.

axigen has a free one for 100 users.. xeams does lack webmail but is otherwise 1 click to install.. http://www.artica.fr/ i havent tried...

or one could install virtualmin or any of the hosting control panels..like zpanel or froxlor..and use them to add mail..

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