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Microsoft's Ballmer: Google Reads Your Mail

Posted by Zonk on Mon Oct 08, 2007 03:22 AM
from the ballmer-lives-in-a-glass-house dept.
Privacy Businesses Communications Google Microsoft The Internet
Anonymous writes "A piece of video has emerged in which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says of Google, 'they read your mail and we don't.' Evidently, it was part of a lengthy discussion on the future of the software business model, and whether advertising could support free consumer software. Ballmer said it doesn't work, at least when it comes to email. '"That's just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It's not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out." Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless.'"
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  • What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nacturation (646836) <nacturation&gmail,com> on Monday October 08 2007, @03:26AM (#20895381) Journal
    Yes, Google "reads" your email in order to serve up context-sensitive advertisements. Microsoft also "reads" your email because if they didn't read your email, they wouldn't be able to transmit it to your browser to be displayed on-screen. That Microsoft chooses to read your email but still serves up irrelevant, obtrusive advertisements is their problem.
     

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rilister (316428)
      Well, I guess it all depends if they reference historical information to serve those ads or not.

      If I were google, I'd build up a statistical record of what words come up most often per user which would be real useful in deciding what "the doors" means in context: is an ad for a record shop relevant or Home Depot?

      Then, of course, that statistical record would start to become an accurate record of who you are after a while. Anyone know the answer?

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Macthorpe (960048)

          So what, M$ wont read your email, they will just monitor their (P)OS as it reads every file on your hard disk
          I think something outrageous like that actually requires you to back it up with a source, don't you?

        • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Interesting)

          by timmarhy (659436) on Monday October 08 2007, @04:30AM (#20895775)
          ermm, no.

          no matter how much you'd like to dramatise it, a bot collecting statistics from your email (which you knowingly agreed to if your using gmail) is not a criminal offence.

          People don't use gmail for privacy, they use it for it's great features and large storage. if google want's to collect data on my account and throw up targeted ads for me why should i give 2 shakes of a donkey's dick about it? they aren't scamming me or keeping tabs on my sex life or political agenda - their selling advertising space, nothing more.

            • Re:What a crock (Score:4, Insightful)

              by budgenator (254554) on Monday October 08 2007, @12:46PM (#20901169) Journal
              There does seem to be a philosophical disconnect there; the real question is can a machine read an email or listen to a phone call? Obviously the answer is no listening and reading are activities that only intelligent sentient beings can do. As long as google's algorithms sever out adds without human intervention or revelation to a third party, it's not an invasion of privacy, as long as no human listens to or reads the transcripts of the NSA wiretap no unreasonable search has happened.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Dhalka226 (559740)

              Watch, though.. those same hyperbolic partisan types will jump to defend Google using arguments that would work exactly as well for the NSA.

              Even if you are right that the technical details or similar enough that the same defenses would apply to both sides (and I'm not conceding that, just not arguing it), it brings one simple thought to mind:

              There is a difference between what a private company does and what the US government does. If you don't think that is so, check out that Constitution thing and the

        • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Interesting)

          by RedWizzard (192002) on Monday October 08 2007, @05:06AM (#20895987)

          Now here is a interesting point which no one has tackled yet. When I go out to my letter box, and open by letter box and look inside my letter box I see 'my' mail, it is no longer the mail of the people who sent it to me, it is my mail, and any unauthorised person who attempts to open my mail, or intercept my mail or read my mail, has committed a criminal offence.
          There are several problems with that analogy. You clearly own your letterbox, but do you own your Gmail inbox? It's on their server. There's a clear argument that you own the account, but the actual contents of the storage dedicated to that account? There's certainly no legal recourse if Google deletes your mail accidentally.

          At what point has Google delivered your mail? When it's in your inbox? When it's been downloaded to your computer? What if they are scanning and indexing it before they move it to your inbox?

          And unencrypted email is not like a sealed letter, it's like a postcard. This is important because privacy of correspondence laws in the US are derived from the 4th Amendment and are therefore restricted by the requirement for a "reasonable expectation of privacy". It's hard to argue that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when the sender sends the correspondence in plain text and with no prior knowledge of what systems it might pass through.

          So when a gmail user sends me an email, google has invaded my privacy as the email receiver and if they attempt to send me a targeted add based upon the contents of my email, have they committed an offence and opened and read my mail with out my authorisation.
          It's doubtful that Google have committed any sort of offense, even if they have actual people reading your mail. Certainly Google would have a very strong defense if they can show that they are following the terms you agreed to when you created the account. Further, a ruling against allowing Google to scan email to target advertising would have far reaching consequences: it would effectively ban the use of spam and virus filters by ISPs as well. I suspect a court would be very unlikely to make such a ruling.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by RedWizzard (192002)

              I think you missed the point ... What I was talking about was at which point the mail some else sends, their mail, becomes the mail you receive, your mail ie. the sender versus the recipient and whose email is being read. So as the receiver getting email into my private ISP provided account I have agreed to nothing with google nor can the sending by use gmail imply that I have.

              Google don't insert ads into outgoing emails. I assumed you were talking about receiving email with a Gmail account because those are the only emails Google scan (at least for targeted advertising).

    • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2007, @03:35AM (#20895463)
      There's a difference between RELAYING data, and MINING it.

      • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2007, @04:02AM (#20895583)
        There's a difference between MINING data, and READING it.

        • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Funny)

          by noidentity (188756) on Monday October 08 2007, @04:46AM (#20895867)
          I'm a robot, and reading data IS mining to me, you insensitive clod!

        • Re:What a crock (Score:4, Interesting)

          by atamido (1020905) on Monday October 08 2007, @09:11AM (#20898341)
          There is a big difference. And I can assure you that when I worked for Microsoft, in their MSN department, I used to personally read the email of quite a few strangers. It was all to try and fix different issues, but you have to read the from and to lines to find messages. And you can't help but see parts of the message when looking at the headers and such. Trust me, whatever you may think, other people's email just isn't that interesting.

          Of course, when you can read a person's email, see personal information and order receipts, and read the email of most of their friends, you can learn quite a bit about a person. Enough to screw with their head in hilarious ways. Not that I ever would have done that, of course.

          As an aside, there are a few things worth mentioning about their backend, at least when I used to work there. They store their email as a single plain text, like most sensible email servers. They don't break it down into objects like Exchange. They log the past 40 or so IP addresses that you logged into your account from. They track the date/time of every single time your password is changed. If you had MSN dialup or DSL, they authenticated against your email every time you connected, using RADIUS I believe. Most send/receive issues are not Hotmail's servers fault. Hotmail's spam filter is probably the worst in existence. MSN's Usenet servers would randomly (around 50%) reject correct passwords. We would tell people their clients were flakey, but it was in fact the authentication connection between the Usenet and Email servers that didn't quite work.

    • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Funny)

      by Aqua OS X (458522) on Monday October 08 2007, @04:38AM (#20895815) Homepage
      It's also worth noting that Hotmail doesn't send or receive many of its messages. Microsoft is going that extra mile by making sure that we also don't read our email.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bytesex (112972)
      That is disingenious to say the least. You purposely mix up what's happening through either intent or technology in both systems. I'm no MS apologist, and I like Google very much, and I do realize there is a whole spectrum between 'parsing to make fit on screen' and 'passing onto the NSA', but MS' intent is to make the text be seen by you (which is nice, and has only my interest at heart), while Google's intent is also to use your text for other, commercial purposes (which clearly doesn't really have my i

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jonnyj (1011131)

      Be careful of typical knee-jerk Slashdot reactions that say Microsoft == Evil and Google == Good. There is a legitimate privacy point here. If I click on a context-sensitive advertisement that's based on the content of my emails, the advertiser now knows something about me that he didn't know before. That gives the advertiser the opportunity to treat me differently from other enquirers.

      How long until advertisers discover that it's more profitable to withhold information about cheap or steeply discounted

    • Re:What a crock (Score:5, Informative)

      by LWATCDR (28044) on Monday October 08 2007, @10:19AM (#20899207) Homepage Journal
      Yep and frankly anyone that thinks Email is any more private than a postcard is an idiot.
      Just a news flash but your email is sent across the internet as plain text! It is not secure in any way shape or form.
      If you want email a private massage then you should encrypt it and send it as an attachment.
      I don't care if it is hotmail, gmail, or outlook.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by LWATCDR (28044)
          Only if the server, recipient, and, you are all on the same network. And nothing would stop the network admin from reading it.

  • Actually (Score:5, Insightful)

    by El Lobo (994537) on Monday October 08 2007, @03:27AM (#20895397)
    Actually, I don't think they "read" the mail. Yes, they have some program that "scans" your mails and indexes it in some way, and then , it shows you the ads if they find some key words. Technically, they are scanning your mail, but a program cannot "read" (ie. process and "understand" the writing). So is it a violation of privacy? May be... this is a border line case.

  • It's official... Google reads your email! Be afraid! Be VERY afraid! It must be true, because Steve Ballmer of Microsoft says so, and we all know how decent Steve is!

    Ahem.

    Excuse me, I got carried away here for just a second. :-)

    By the way, if you don't want anyone to read your email, don't use gmail, hotmail or yahoo mail... But do use GPG and a local email client, other than Outlook... mmmmmkay?
  • To watch the said video, you'll need to sign up for a mydeo account, which is apparently not free, but a 31 day limited trial.

  • so... (Score:3, Informative)

    by cosmocain (1060326) on Monday October 08 2007, @03:36AM (#20895469)
    From TFA:

    Microsoft and Google have been gearing up for a major war over software as a service and web-based applications, with Google offering Gmail and Google docs, and Microsoft offering Hotmail, Office and preparing for Windows Live Office.


    it's just the last sentence and it contains every justification of mixing up the verbs "to read" and "to process". reading is something done by humans, not some word-sensitive processing for freaking advertisements. everyone a bit tech-savvy knows about googles somehow strange interpretation of privacy - so: if you don't like it, don't ******* use it.

  • I knew it (Score:5, Funny)

    by jsse (254124) on Monday October 08 2007, @03:37AM (#20895479) Homepage Journal

    Ballmer says of Google, 'they read your mail and we don't.'
    Now I know why you don't respond to my comments and complains, you just simply don't read them at all.

    Your honesty as a corporate leader shines us all.
    • LOL! Not to mention Microsoft doesn't read those messages from "Click here to send Feedback to Microsoft".
  • I quite like contextual adds. My Inbox is full of Coyotos and Hurd related emails, so I get to have a good chuckle every time I get advertisements for Minix 3. Nice try Andy.

    And what is with the gasps? If you have sensitive mail, you need to be using pop3 and encrypting it. That's just common sense.

  • The full quote... (Score:4, Funny)

    by darthflo (1095225) on Monday October 08 2007, @03:50AM (#20895549)
    The video mentioned in TFS is, of course, a fake. The actual quote was this: Ballmer: [...] they read your mail and we don't, but our Developers, Developers, Developers are working on that! Developers, Developers, Developers...

    After a few minutes of his "developers" chant, Ballmer was reported as throwing chairs at every googly seeming person in the room.
  • did he not get the memo from?
    "m$ and google and are evil"

    oh wait...
  • Ok, so Google's Gmail "reads" my emails. So what?!

    1. Email is transmitted in plain text anyways... so anyone can read it.
    2. My machine could be compromised. Someone could use a keylogger or other method to capture my keystrokes and read what would be my email.
    3. I could run my own mail server and read my user's mail.

    To combat 1 and 3, I could use PGP or GNUpg (or some other means, for that matter) and encrypt my mail. Privided that I distribute my keys via key server or some other non-mail related means,

  • If Microsoft doesn't "read" your mail the same way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lpontiac (173839) on Monday October 08 2007, @04:17AM (#20895685)
    (ie pass it through software which matches up tokens against a database containing other tokens) .. then how do they filter out spam?

  • Gmail (Score:4, Insightful)

    by u235meltdown (940099) <qayshp@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Monday October 08 2007, @04:18AM (#20895693) Homepage
    I have been using Gmail since 2004, and am glad to say I haven't deleted an email (other than spam) yet. It is understandable that there are privacy concerns with this type of archival of personal data. Personally, I think that the benefits outweigh the potential risks. I don't discuss anything too private over email or the internet for that matter because of the fact that it is less personal. The ease of having all my multiple personal, work, and school email addresses forward to one globally accessible inbox is just worth it to me.

  • Lets be honest here, this is MICROSOFT we are talking about here warning us that Google doesn't respect our privacy. Well they should know shouldn't they? The creators of the least secure OS ever made, the OS that updates itself when we don't want it too, that has a EULA that gives MS the right to snoop around on your system, read whatever it wants and alter whatever it wants and if it destroys anything, too bad. The OS that has been known to phone home until someone found out and then they disable it saying that they couldn't identify you from just your IP and credit card number and every other bit of personal information they could find.

    Sure google reads your gmail, we know this. It is how it works, they are very clear about it and if you don't like it, don't use it. It is not like google has a monopoly or anything they have been found guilty of abusing on several continents, that forces you to use their services.

    Sometimes I think MS needs to hire a person to increase their public relations. The task would not be complex. He just stands next to the microphone at MS press-release center, and whenever an MS employee walks up to it, he zaps them.

    Or put more simple? MS if you want to improve your image, SHUT UP. Do NOT say a single thing for the next year and your image will go through the roof, because you just keep saying these insane things that everyone with a brain can see for the complete and utter lying bullshit it really is.

    FUD only works when you got a shred of believability left. If Steve Ballmer proclaimed that the sky was blue, I would doubt that.

    What next, Bush calling Blair a bit of thicky who lied to his voters about Iraq? Britney Spears calling the Spice Girls a bad act? Germany commenting on the US tendency to start wars?

    Really, MS needs to hire a public relation officer who knows that less is more. The only thing Steve Ballmer should be allowed to say in a year is, Hi, these are the profit figures for last year. Thank you, goodbye.

    I wonder if the shareholders can demand he keeps his mouth shut because he is damaging the value of the company.

  • Pot, meet Kettle (Score:3, Interesting)

    by waferhead (557795) <waferhead&yahoo,com> on Monday October 08 2007, @04:20AM (#20895709)
    Didn't Hotmail have some brouhaha awhile back where the fine detail of the EULA basically said they OWNED any email/IP that went through their service?

    Maybe I'm just delusional again...

  • Just encrypt the real mails with GPG and it won't matter if they "read" it.
    Just force everyone else to use it aswell.

  • Please quote completely (Score:5, Funny)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Monday October 08 2007, @04:59AM (#20895937)
    I hate people who quote out of context. At least be complete.

    they read your mail and we don't ...have to because we know everything we want to know about you through the phoning home of our OS.

  • Ballmers Proof (Score:3, Funny)

    by PinkyDead (862370) on Monday October 08 2007, @05:10AM (#20895997) Journal
    Pretty damning evidence:

    From: sergey.brin@hotmail.com
    To: eric.schmidt@msn.com
    Re: Reading user's gmail

    Eric,

    Sounds like a great idea.

    S.

  • BadAnalogyMan says... (Score:3, Funny)

    by adnonsense (826530) on Monday October 08 2007, @05:19AM (#20896051) Homepage Journal

    This is like a ginormous soot-stained, pitted, dented and immobile pot which has been simmering for the last twenty-five years calling the nearby, newish and rapidly expanding kettle made from stainless steel which is now somewhat more rusty than it was in 1998, black.

    BTW Google reads your slashdot comments too.

  • Speaks To CEOs strikes again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by simong (32944) on Monday October 08 2007, @05:31AM (#20896129) Homepage
    Ballmer's job is to serve FUD to those who read Forbes Magazine for the articles, and he's done it again. He plants seeds of doubt in the minds of people who probably have their emails printed out for them, and can't tell the difference between Gmail, Hotmail or the corporate Lotus Notes system that's rapidly coming to the end of its life. The sysadmins will shortly recommend dumping Notes for a system based on Zimbra [zimbra.com], but as the CEO goes to sign it off at a tenth of the price of an equivalent MS Exchange system, he notices in the high level description that it supports Gmail... wait, isn't that a bad thing? The proposal is rejected and the CEO's doubt sets in motion the installation of a shiny new Exchange system, and Microsoft take another scalp thanks to Speaks To CEOs' ramblings.

  • talking through his back.ORIFICE as usual .. (Score:4, Informative)

    by rs232 (849320) on Monday October 08 2007, @05:49AM (#20896273)
    "When you register for certain Microsoft services, we will ask you to provide personal information. The information we collect may be combined with information obtained from other Microsoft services and other companies. We use cookies and other technologies to keep track of your interactions with our sites and services to offer a personalised experience" http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/default.aspx [microsoft.com]

  • Sending mail in the clear is nutty (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zigurd (3528) on Monday October 08 2007, @07:10AM (#20896999) Homepage
    Back in the day when networks were all wired, and mail servers were all on the premises, and computers had 80286 CPUs, it might have made sense for mail to be sent and stored in cleartext. Nowadays, storing mail and documents that way, and sending them over unprotected WiFi access points, is a huge privacy and security hole. It's a bit shocking that not even open source mail clients and servers still, by default, don't secure payload with encryption.

    As for Webmail, Web-based backup services could not even be sold without encrypting payload. How is it that lack of encryption is still acceptable in Webmail?

  • Steve: (Score:4, Funny)

    by xrayspx (13127) on Monday October 08 2007, @09:20AM (#20898443) Homepage
    It's not that we love Google reading our mail, it's that we just don't like you.

    Sincerely,

    The Internet
    • So... If this access is secret, how exactly do you know of it?

      ("Sometimes I wish the government would actually kill conspiracy theorists, even if it were just to prove them right")

    • I for one salute our new Google overlords!

      Well, at least we know they will know where to search for us!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by brkello (642429)
      I don't understand why you don't understand. Webmail is easy to set up and there is never a question if your can get access to it. Any system connected to the Internet will have a browser and therefor you will have access to your mail. Some people don't want to (or know how) to have their own domain and run their own mail server.

      So you read the terms and conditions and you are worried because your privacy rights could be violated. Do you send e-mail to anyone with these accounts? Do you encrypt your e

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