Microsoft's Ballmer: Google Reads Your Mail

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.'"

Comments

What a crock

[nacturation]

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:What a crock

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between RELAYING data, and MINING it.

Re:What a crock

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between MINING data, and READING it.

Re:What a crock

[timmarhy]

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

[Aqua OS X]

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:What a crock

[noidentity]

I'm a robot, and reading data IS mining to me, you insensitive clod!

Re:What a crock

[RedWizzard]

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:What a crock

[rtb61]

Here you go, http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/17/1536230, perhaps you can ask them for proof ;).

Re:What a crock

[jonnyj]

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 products from potential customers who've previously received emails from luxury car manufacturers, for example? I don't know if it's possible with the present generation of Google's technology, but is there anything ion the Gmail terms and conditions that prevent it?

Re:What a crock

[atamido]

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

[LWATCDR]

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:What a crock

[budgenator]

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.

Actually

[El Lobo]

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.

Re:Actually

[Angostura]

Precisely. Unfortunately for Ballmer, if he had said 'analyse' or 'parse' it wouldn't sound nearly as sexy as 'read'.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

[Noryungi]

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!

[Mr_Mirsal]

Even if it wasn't a miserable FUD attempt, I would say 'so what ?'
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.

so...

[cosmocain]

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

[jsse]

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.

The full quote...

[darthflo]

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.

If Microsoft doesn't "read" your mail the same way

[lpontiac]

(ie pass it through software which matches up tokens against a database containing other tokens) .. then how do they filter out spam?

Gmail

[u235meltdown]

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.

They don't need to, they got your PC by the balls

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Every email provider reads your emails

[this great guy]

I would add that virtually every email service provide already reads your emails... how does Balmer think anti-spam technogologies work ? Duh ! (Notable exception: greylisting.)

Please quote completely

[Opportunist]

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

[PinkyDead]

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.

Speaks To CEOs strikes again

[simong]

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, 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 ..

[rs232]

"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

Steve:

[xrayspx]

It's not that we love Google reading our mail, it's that we just don't like you.

Sincerely,

The Internet