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MS Targets Google With Another Smear Campaign
walterbyrd writes with news that Microsoft's PR department has started a campaign to convince Gmail users that Google reads your personal emails, referring to Google's automated method of scanning emails for keywords to generate supposedly relevant advertising.
"The gist of the scare campaign is that Google is a scary, scary company that reads your private emails in order to send you targeted ads. 'Even if you don't use Gmail, if you send email to someone who does, Google goes through those emails to generate advertising revenue too,' Microsoft warns in material sent to reporters. Oh, and Microsoft points out that six class-action lawsuits have been filed against Google over this issue, and asks people to sign a petition 'to tell Google to stop going through your personal email messages.'"
Google does scan your emails for keywords. That information may be stored or revealed in any number of ways.
I think it's more than a bit disingenuous because the video has this person's eyes superimposed over your e-mail while mischievous music plays in the background. We all know that it's not a person reading the e-mails, it's software doing latent semantic indexing or some such algorithm.
They might not be lying but they are deceiving. Tell me how my Hotmail knows how to classify incoming e-mails as spam again? OH! You're running a Bayesian classification algorithm and building word statistics out of my e-mail?! They're reading my e-mails! Cue judging eyeballs over my e-mail with corny music.
Note: I'm not defending Google but I'm pretty sure that some type of software runs some sort of algorithm on your e-mails if you go through any reputable major e-mail provider. Hell, my debian postfix server is attached to a bunch of algorithmic open source programs to do just that!
My work here is dung.
Is it a "Smear Campaign" if it's true?
Well, it's not entirely true. I think most people consider the definition of reading to mean "looked" at and that it is implicitly a human that is reading your e-mail in this case. The eyes superimposed in the first video imply this. What's actually happening is that your e-mail is being loaded into memory and parsed to build an index associated with some key that is associated with you and that is being stored. This data is then used to serve targeted ads. Do you really think that a person is involved at any point so far? Do you really think there's a Google employee looking over raw table data and rubbing one out when he sees that "ky jelly" is associated with user 57234765235 at a rate of 0.0054% of the time with a high precision value? Really? Show me a mail service provider that neither loads your e-mail into memory (alias "reads" it) nor stores it in a database and I'll show you extraterrestrial beings.
Pretty "slanted" summary, but I guess this is Slashdot and the story is about Microsoft.
Really? Where are Google's commercials of equal proportions? I guarantee you they would make for a story just like this.
Now, who's more evil? Google or Microsoft? Hard to tell around here sometimes...
Just because one evil is smearing another evil of less, equal or greater proportions doesn't make it not a smear campaign! This is exactly what it is! Disingenuous advertising meant to unduly spread uncertainty and deceit! How does Microsoft detect spam? The same damn way!
My work here is dung.
Why would you want ads when reading your email at all?
I don't want, them, but I am willing to accept them because I am an adult, and I know that there is no Santa Claus. Corporations don't provide services out of the goodness of their heart. The ads pay for the "free" email, and also help pay for Google's research into autonomous vehicles, improved search technology, etc. So I accept them, occasionally click on them, and sometimes even buy something.
This seems to be horrible mental gymnastics to try to maintain "Google good!" fanboism.
Expecting something for nothing is being childish. Grow up.
No.
Google employees weren't reading the email. The US government now has a stupid law that when a law enforcement agency requests email, companies are required to hand it over without a warrant. That didn't mean anyone from Google was reading it ahead of time.
Someone should contest this (along with warantless wiretapping, GPS tracking, etc) to the Supreme Court because this behavior should be unconstitutional. Blame the executive branch for massively overstepping their authority.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Microsoft actually does the exact same thing. So where is the 1000 post thread about it?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
In the states, our foremost vital constitutional right is that of free speech, which means you can say that your competition sucks if you like. Or not say it. Or say yours is great. Or say both. Or neither.