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Microsoft Improves Gmail Experience For Windows 10 Insiders, But There Are Privacy Concerns (betanews.com)
Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, Microsoft announced a new Gmail experience for Windows 10. While only available for Windows Insiders as of today, it uses the same concept as the Outlook mobile app, but for the Mail and Calendar apps. Microsoft will provide you with an arguably improved experience as long as you are OK with storing all of your Gmail messages in Microsoft's cloud. What types of features will the new experience offer? Things such as tracking packages, getting updated on your favorite sports teams, and a focused inbox. "To power these new features, we'll ask your permission to sync a copy of your email, calendar and contacts to the Microsoft Cloud. This will allow new features to light up, and changes to update back and forth with Gmail -- such as creation, edit or deletion of emails, calendar events and contacts. But your experience in Gmail.com or apps from Google will not change in any way."
Slashdot editors, can you please stop putting these "BetaNews" submissions on the front page?
These submissions are by far some of the worst ones that end up on the front page.
"BetaNews" is linked to from a submission almost every day! Hell, it was linked to twice on March 31, and from three submissions on March 25!
If want wanted to read "BetaNews" articles, which we don't, we would go directly to that site instead of coming to Slashdot!
Please stop putting mediocre content from "BetaNews" on the Slashdot front page, especially when it appears to be the authors of the articles who are submitting them here!
Please, no more "BetaNews" at Slashdot!
So they're going to copy your data from one cloud to another.
When will the madness stop?
Clouds... apps.... hosts... files.... must resist madn....... MOO!!!!
#DeleteFacebook
letting a corporation read all your email and sell you as a product to advertisers? Letting two corporations read all your email and sell you as a product to advertisers!
Yes, I get it. Satya Nadella is from Microsoft's Cloud Division so all things MS/Windows 10 have to go "cloud" now and of course all your dataz haz to bee in ze Maikrozoft Klaud az zoon az pozzible. But here's my question: If Windows 10 as an OS cannot be trusted with very basic Privacy - phoning home all the time and such - why on earth would I put all my Gmails in the Microsoft Cloud? If I cannot trust your OS sitting on my own harddrive, why would I trust your Cloud sitting on your servers somewhere? Can you trust Google more than Microsoft? I don't know the answer to that. All I know is - if Windows 10 isn't private, your Cloud service probably isn't very private either. My 2 Cents.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Can somebody clarify what the summary is trying to say? It's gibberish, especially for someone like me who hasn't used Windows in years. When the summary says 'Gmail' is it really referring to email services offered by any provider? Is it wrongly using 'Gmail' to refer to email in general?
slashdot is a cloud for anonymous cowards to call you an idiot
Those who don't object to gmail won't object to this, and MS eats a share of Google's gmail lunch. I'm surprised it took them this long. Not that I'll be using this or anything, but I admire this move from the surveillance as a service perspective.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
This isn't even about cloud, this is about capturing user data so MS can mine it. MS is desperate for user data which is why they bought Skype, LinkedIn, and to a lesser degree MineCraft.
I guarantee gmail content will be used to feed ads to the desktop. That's their goal.
Right...Minecraft. They bought Minecraft to "mine user data." As opposed to, say, redstone.
You had a good point until you went off the rails like a frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic usually does. Oh dear, and they'll use "gmail content" to "feed ads to the desktop?" You realize that Google is essentially doing the same thing to people's phones and tablets, right? Not to mention anyone stupid enough to use Google search and Chrome with no ad-blocking extensions.
In either case they've bought so many big-name services that they can hardly be called "desperate" for data at this point, can they? It's more like "swimming in an endless sea" of surveillance than being "desperate" for anything at this point. Ah well, as I'm sure you tell everyone who will listen and can tolerate the stink on your breath, use something else if you don't like it.
Remember what a great man said sometime back. "Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice, .. no you can't fool me."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or will you get cut off when Google changes something on their end?
Twinstiq, game news
Letting one corporate giant rifle through your personal email is bad enough. Letting two of them? Why? "I have a hole in my head. Let me improve it by drilling another hole in the head"!!!! How can that be an improvement?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And I suspect that Windows as an OS is dying slowly, to be replaced by Android/iOS powered computing devices in the next 5 years. So Microsoft desperately needs a new "Windows" like platform - this time it is the Microsoft Cloud. They are trying desperately to shift all your shit into the Cloud, so you become DEPENDENT on using the Cloud. Once Microsoft has you in the Cloud, they will push SAAS - Software As A Service - on you hard. There won't be any significant "software" sitting on your harddrive anymore. Just little front-end "Apps" - essentially just GUIs - that connect to a cloud server back end. Of course you will have to "rent" those apps just like you have to with Adobe/Autodesk software. This means that you will have to provide things like credit card data to Microsoft, which of course Microsoft will datamine and sell to Big Data companies for a lot of money. Its "1984", just that this time, 1984 happens "in the Cloud".
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
What exactly is wrong with just using IMAP & SMTP? We don't need "apps" for any of this.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Dear MS,
I'd go through great lengths to not having anything to do with you.
The day you bought hotmail I jumped.
Do you really think I'd hand you over control to my email?
Stop sniffing glue!
Sincerely
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Its in the top-right corner of my browserand IT KNOW THAT I AM HERE SHITTING ON IT. Microsoft has my Gmail's... They know EVERYTHING about me... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH... 1984 - 1984 - 1984 - 1984....
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
You Sir are a Klutz... sorry... a Cloud a Cloud... You are a Cloud... A nice fluffy cloud in a blue sky, too... =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
What I don't get is why Google doesn't bring more of its apps to Windows. While I realize Chrome is a platform for Google apps, I'd love to have a Windows version of the actual GMail app for my Windows tablet, rather than the pretty shitty built-in Windows Mail app.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Honestly, that very question about "Microsoft" or "Google" is the crux - and frankly, I just don't know. But I sure don't automatically trust Google any more than I trust Microsoft, that's for sure.
It's a non issue for me - lots of companies are running their mail on the Microsoft cloud anyway. I try to balance things, not too much on Facebook, not too much on Microsoft, not too much on Apple.. at the moment, I don't use Google, but who knows?
Realistically, Google are doing the same as Microsoft here -- hell, Gmail were mining your email for relevant targeted adds LONG before the current generation of outlook.com existed - so frankly, I'm not sure what the complaint is.
"Microsoft Improves Gmail Experience For Windows 10 Insiders..."
Uh-oh.
I've had enough experience with Microsoft's 'improvements' to know that it's going to be a huge clusterfuck of usability and privacy problems.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This is asking for headaches and issues because you're forcing all of your mail and calendar/contact data to get stored TWICE and synced properly and rapidly between both entities consistently, at all times. Twice the risk of something going wrong with 2 major points of failure in the mix.
> why Google doesn't bring more of its apps to Windows.
Because Microsoft won't allow those apps in its store.
Unlike Google where Microsoft has many apps in Play Store.
It's bizarre to me that so many commenters seem to trust Google more than Microsoft. I get not trusting either of them. I don't understand trusting Google.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
'nuff said.
It's simple, really: Miscreant-o-soft understands that the average computer user is not very smart, and couldn't really understand the issues at hand even if you sat them down and spent as much time as your cared to explaining it to them. However, since Miscreant-o-soft is giving them something (ostensibly) worth hundreds of dollars for FREE (i.e., Windows 10), and since Miscreant-o-soft is telling them it's SAFER and MORE SECURE, the average sheep with a computer is going to believe them, not weird geeky computer nerds on the Internets. Really, they don't care so long as they can play their games, watch YouTube, and get their email. So if friendly, security-conscious Microsoft is telling them "hey, we'll do this thing for you for FREE, too, just because we like you so much!", the sheep will likely believe that, too, and give away their Google mail as well as everything else they're giving away.
Diarrhea - the post.
that uses the windows system for anything else than running other apps that arent microsoft apps with a couple of exceptions like office or excell, its fucking stupid and DESERVES what is going to get.
Can you trust Google more than Microsoft?
While this is in general an excellent question, for this specific situation it is irrelevant, because by using GMail, Google will always have access to your mail. As such, the question is, "do you trust Microsoft enough to hand over all of your GMail data to them so that Microsoft and Google have it as opposed to just Google?"
There is no truth in that statement
I don't think Windows as an OS is just dying, I think in their arrogant stupidity M$ are killing it. They seem to have this whole destructive management circle jerk going on, where the customers are stupid, gullible idiots who will accept any exploitation what so ever and who are not entitled to any privacy what so ever and ever worse, all small and medium businesses should have their proprietary secrets opened up to M$ for exploitation.
Think how badly M$ has performed, they had a massive lead over Google with MSN and they blew by being arrogant arse holes with whole page ads and web searches for the first bunch of pages being irrelevant ads. The turned a desktop GUI into a mobile phone GUI to try to force sales of mobile phones. Some of the OSs they released were bug ridden and awful, didn't care. Customers have complained again and again about invasions of privacy and M$ doesn't give care, just forcing it in deeper and deeper and deeper.
It's like they have gone full blown stupid, instead of making smart changes, they are stuck in a management circle jerk, doomed to follow the Lotus eaters to oblivion.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I use Autoruns to disable Microsoft Windows mail then bring a shortcut to the desktop for Forte Agent (from a different drive).
I've done this since at least NT/Win98, I've never lost any mail, and already setup. And I still have a Hotmail.com account.
I've been using Outlook at work for years. The experience is hardly a selling point to lure me away from GMail! I so wish my company would switch to GMail for Business, it's so much easier and more intuitive to use. Not to mention, Outlook stinks at search.
For all those who think Edge is the best browser, you should probably sign up for this new Microsoft GMail service. For the rest of us, not so much.
Minecraft was utilized as bait to get people to submit to Windows 10 (can't run the non-java version on = 8.1), so indirectly yes it's part of the grand plan.
More broadly Minecraft was purchased to gain access to the huge community that's built up around it, but then they fucked that up by making the new version totally incompatible with the classic version and all its existing 3rd party content. Today Minecraft PE (Pleb Edition) is just another popular phone app that happens to also run on a desktop that they're monetizing in the usual way: microtransactions.
They didn't for BB10 and it had more market share at the time. BlackBerry would have paid for Google to put their application on BB10.
I'd prefer they'd improve the web app. That way it can be used anywhere and doesn't depend on Google porting their apps to your favourite OS
Last I checked the Mail app was installed locally and not on the cloud.
You wouldn't have typed this in Chrome or an Android phone perhaps? Do you have a Dropbox or Google Drive? Have an Itunes or Gmail account? If you answered YES to any of this then you are hypocritical.
What I find ironically when reading this is Google stores all the stuff on THEIR cloud. But we give Google a free pass because they are cool.
If anything Microsoft is doing what everyone else is doing and was behind. Google and Amazon got to the cloud first and now they need to go in to compete. If this were Thunderbird you all would probably say how cool and awesome it is but if Microsoft does it then it is evil and attempt to steal your data.
I haven't seen any full blown desktop apps yet
http://saveie6.com/
Your reference to 1984 betrays you.
Look, I understand that you hate Microsoft. I get that Windows isn't your bag, man. However your obsessions, they aren't for public consumption. You should be hiding those in shame, out back, behind the shed.
Lots of people (not just Microsoft) think that the Cloud is a pretty big deal. Let's see, there's Google, Facebook, Amazon, HP, Salesforce, IBM, Adobe, ..., well, you get the idea. And even though I believe on-premises deployment will be with us for a very long time yet, Cloud clearly has some traction.
As such, it seems improbable that Android/iOS will be such overwhelming winners that they will kill off Windows. After all Android/iOS are endpoint operating systems and Windows is... an endpoint operating system too. Hmmm, that's strange! I wonder how you came to the conclusion that Windows is the dead duck in that group?
Oh right, your anti-Microsoft obsession. Get a room!
This faggot also never links to the real source in the summary. /. mods, stop wasting people's time!
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/04/21/introducing-new-experience-gmail-accounts-windows-10-mail-calendar-apps/