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