Microsoft's Ballmer: Google Reads Your Mail 264
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.'"
What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
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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?
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Re:What a crock (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What a crock (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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And technically, it's not spyware, since spyware usually resides on the client's machine.
if google wants 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?
I dunno. Some of us do care. We do not approve of our communications being 'harvested' and used to direct targeted adv
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That's what I love about shashdot... I'm not the only geek here who sees weird stuff like that. Anyway, I'm not gonna bash g-mail, and in fact have recently created my first account there. Yahoo stopped offering free POP download, so what do you do? G-mail is free, and seems to work just fine. As for privacy, it all gets piped to the NSA anyway. I don't think it would be possible to violate my privacy more witho
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Re:What a crock (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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This is something called "digital" at some point something is going to actually read your message! Yes! It will! If your scared why not encrypt all your email? The so called "people" reading this email will not be able to see it plaintext, and the machines digest it as normal.
Everything reads the goddamn mail, its information going over wires. Your analogy breaks down with the real mail because it never has to be opened to be transmitted...email has to be "read" by all the damn routers it goes
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The difference, and it is a big one, is that google is processing the text you transport through their mechanism to discern information to use against you. Yes, I view advertisers and advertising as primarily being targeted to be used against the consumer.
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If you think advertising is "being used against you", get your ass off Googles free (as in beer) offerings. Luckily many others conside
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Perhaps not (Score:2)
If you rely on the fact google doesn't read your mail you might be disappointed.
Re:What a crock (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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).
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b) people voluntarily chose to allow google to do such when they signed up for gmail. dont like it? dont use gmail. there are thousands if not millions of other email services out there.
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Re:What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a crock (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What a crock (Score:4, 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.
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Ah yes, because automated data mining is perfect and requires no human intervention or tuning. It's also certain that nobody would ever verify whether it was working or not.
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We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties
That certainly suggests they're mining data. It doesn't say outright it won't mine, given the concerns of Google's policies you think they'd make that fairly explicit if they didn't mine. Also:
We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services.
Considering Google believes that targeted ads with an increase in how targeted they are is part of its services it provides, I'd say they certainly leave themselves open to the ability to mine data.
Re:What a crock (Score:5, Funny)
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Is that why I can't receive hotmail with yahoo? (Score:2)
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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
It;'s not ad hominem to question motives (Score:2, Insightful)
It is perfectly acceptable to agree with concerns about a company's activities, but question the motives of those making the objections. It's like a murderer criticising a drug dealer - it seems the murderer
It gets better (Score:2)
For th
Re:What a crock (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actually (Score:5, Insightful)
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:The sky is falling! The sky is falling! (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mails are sent through the internet in fully readable plain text.
You don't want anyone to read your email ? Then encrypt it. Period.
Every email provider reads your emails (Score:5, Insightful)
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If hotmail is any indication, not well at all.
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You don't want anyone to read your email ? Then encrypt it. Period.
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You don't want anyone to read your email ? Then encrypt it. Period.
That's fine with non-webmail. But with webmail (assuming you even can encrypt it in that case, which I doubt very much with any of the available providers) at least the webmail provider must read the mail in order to display it to you.
More importantly, there's a big difference between being able to catch individual mails along the way and reading and analysing my 20 (yes: two-zero) years of e-mail history.
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Also, as other posters have pointed out, there's things like FireGPG for those who do use the web interface.
Just so you know... (Score:2)
so... (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Your honesty as a corporate leader shines us all.
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I had really wished sometime ago that it would be displayed this way: "Click here to send FUD back to Microsoft"
It would make more sense, I would be encouraged to click it...
Meh (Score:2)
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)
After a few minutes of his "developers" chant, Ballmer was reported as throwing chairs at every googly seeming person in the room.
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did he not get the memo? (Score:2)
"m$ and google and are evil"
oh wait...
Whoopie! (Score:2)
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,
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Are you saying that we have to 'secure' it before we can expect any level of privacy?
My home isn't completely secure. Get this - I have windows covered in GLASS for crying out loud... GLASS. Can you beleive that?! I don't know what I was thinking, but there you have it! I really haven't got a clue why the place isn't full of hobos and bums with naught but a lousy glass barrier being all that's keeping them out.
Or maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to locked down lik
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I know my email could be read by my ISP, but I mostly trust them not to do it. And I would feel pretty angry and upset if I found out an employee was sitting their reading all my email for kicks. I would expect that he be fired at the very least once caught. If I had anything truly private that I didn't want to risk I would take it upon myself to secure it betterl but just because I didn't encrypt something that doesn't mean I expect or give permission to everyone on the planet to read it.
Even if your ISP specifically said, "We will read your email for the purposes of serving you targetted advertising"? That's what Google does, and if you've signed up and agreed to this, there's not a single reason you have to be angry at them for doing so. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you didn't read that part of the sign-up process, that's your own fault - you still agreed to it.
As many others have already pointed out, email is like a postcard, not a letter. If I send you a postcard, I ful
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Your analogy is a bit lacking at best. Glass still provides some access control, albeit very minimal. How would this compare to open / no glass windows? Glass may allow the bums an
If Microsoft doesn't "read" your mail the same way (Score:5, Interesting)
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Do I care? Not a whit. As far as I know, the information gleaned from the 'read' isn't stored anywhere after the page is loaded (IE: it's only ever in RAM) and no human ever does the reading. If either of those things were happening, I'd care.
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If either of those things were happening, I'd care.
The thing is, no-one knows if they're happening because Google doesn't say. My post here [slashdot.org] pulls out quotes from their privacy policy that certainly hints at them storing the information gleaned as part of their profile about you, with the original person who put me onto this lack of denying over here. [slashdot.org]
Gmail (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't need to, they got your PC by the balls (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Maybe I'm just delusional again...
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http://www.aaxnet.com/news/M010512.html#rights [aaxnet.com]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/30/all_your_data_and_biz/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/03/1535244 [slashdot.org]
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Not if you encrypt it. (Score:2)
Just force everyone else to use it aswell.
Please quote completely (Score:5, Funny)
they read your mail and we don't
What Ballmer meant to say (Score:2)
Which is true, so no reason to get angry at him.
Ballmers Proof (Score:3, Funny)
To: eric.schmidt@msn.com
Re: Reading user's gmail
Eric,
Sounds like a great idea.
S.
BadAnalogyMan says... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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And the Wayback Machine keeps them forever! Muahahahah!
So does Microsoft (Score:2)
I assume it isn't psychic and somewhere down the line, a bot reads the mail's content, matches it in both a baysian and literal way and makes a decision as to whether the mail was unsolicited.
Gmail reads the mail, does the same, but also sends keywords to an adbot.
Both read your mail Ballmer, you twit.
The only difference is you guys weren't smart enough to attach the spam bot to the ad bot.
Speaks To CEOs strikes again (Score:5, Insightful)
spam filters (Score:2, Insightful)
talking through his back.ORIFICE as usual .. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't use any for private e-mail (Score:2, Interesting)
Though I'm a little skeptical about his motives Ballmer is doing some good here. Of course it won't get past the MS is bad
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Duh.
Yes, there are some things to be worried about webmails, as security of email services, because then someone who knows me or wants to know about my plans could extract _concrete_ info. But "reading" such emails in masses...I think that
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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
I don't mind... (Score:2)
Sending mail in the clear is nutty (Score:3, Informative)
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?
"Reading Mail" and Bush "Spying on Americans" (Score:2)
Monkey man (Score:2)
"Google reads your mail" (Score:2)
Steve: (Score:4, Funny)
Sincerely,
The Internet
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("Sometimes I wish the government would actually kill conspiracy theorists, even if it were just to prove them right")
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I'm guessing the reference is to the _NSAKEY [wikipedia.org] variable.
There's still a fair bit of controversy over whether it is a real backdoor or not. Given that the NSA did add a backdoor to the international version of Lotus Notes, it would be unsurprising for them to try the same thing with Windows.
You just need to ask yourself how likely it is that Microsoft stuck up for their customers' rights when asked add the same to their OS.
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Well, at least we know they will know where to search for us!
I have... (Score:2)