Email war: Google Gmail versus Microsoft

[bekdik]

Gmail is not shoving ads down people's throats - you agree to Gmail serving you with ads when you sign up for an account.

It's not that one is being presented with ads. It's that Google is reading your mail to ascertain which ads to present. How would you feel if your postal delivery service read all your mail?

 

[Viva]

While this may be true, what you seem to be doing is to use this as justification for Google snooping into your messages. There are issues such as internet security with security companies like Kaspersky informing us that 75% of companies experienced internet security issues last year. Now we then allow Google to dip their fingers into our secrets. Collecting catalogues of our life circumstances. Who knows what else they are collecting. The fact actually is, when I sign up with an email service provider, the last thing on my mind is adverts. Sure they come with the service, but, I certainly did not give them permission to tailor make ads by looking through my emails.

Whether or not Google (or any other company for that matter) scan your email to serve contextualized ads, you still have to trust them to use their service in the first place. Google, Yahoo!, Live Mail, AOL Mail and all the other providers obviously have access to your emails. It's stored on their servers! So it's really irrelevant whether or not they (and by they I'm obviously referring to their servers, not actual people) scan your mail to serve targeted ads. In your case, you still have to trust that Yahoo! will protect your mail. I trust that Google and Yahoo! will protect my mail.

The answer here is pretty simple; do not resort to violating people's privacy while you do it. Imagine if the South African Post Office starts tailor making adverts for you. Scary thoughts.

It's not that one is being presented with ads. It's that Google is reading your mail to ascertain which ads to present. How would you feel if your postal delivery service read all your mail?

You can't compare this to actual physical post (like the Microsoft video), as a computer can't scan actual post. A human would have to do that, which would obviously be wrong.

It is companies like Google for which new laws are made because of their desperate efforts to out-do their competitors. The fact that (as we have now realised from the MS ad) they use our email messages to tailor make ads for us is just downright creepy. Yes, I have seen that the their ads are more in line with say the kind of work that I do, but, where do we draw the line and does free email mean no privacy? Google definitely seems to agree with this.

How is it creepy that a server scans your mail for keywords in order to serve targeted ads? Then, in your mind, it must be scary as hell that your mail lies on Yahoo's servers and they can in theory access it anytime they want.

I'm also sorry to hear you only now realised that Google does this. It's been public knowledge for quite some time now. The Microsoft video hardly exposed anything.

What is not up for debate however, is the use of snoopy tactics.

It would have been snoopy if it was a) actual people reading the mail or b) not properly communicated to Gmail users. But none of these are the case, so I wouldn't say it's snoopy at all.

 

[bekdik]

You can't compare this to actual physical post (like the Microsoft video), as a computer can't scan actual post. A human would have to do that, which would obviously be wrong.

I guess you've never heard of anti-spam or anti-virus software.

 

[Viva]

I guess you've never heard of anti-spam or anti-virus software.

I'm sorry, but I don't know where you're coming from with this. You must be misunderstanding me somehow, so allow me to clarify:

You can't compare the automated electronic scanning of emails to an actual human being reading your physical post (like the Microsoft video does). I agree that if a human did manually read emails or physical post, it would be wrong. But this is not the case with Gmail.

What on earth has anti-spam or anti-virus software got to do with this?

 

[Easter Bunny]

just like a piece of software scans your emails for keywords to link to ads, there is another piece of software that scans your email for keywords to identify if it's spam.

whether you like it or not, if you send an email, there will be several servers scanning that email to make sure it's not spam or that you haven't attached a virus.

 

[Elimentals]

The Joke is Microsoft is just as guilty in regard to intruding into your lives.
See http://choice.live.com/Default.aspx Microsoft Ads

Why are some ads personalized?

To provide you with a more relevant online experience, Microsoft Advertising customizes a portion of the online ads that you see based on your past online activity. Information about your past online activity, or the activity of other people using this computer, might be used to help predict your interests and select the ads that you see.

The fact that they scan your mail for Virus and spam tells you they "read" your email as well. The worst part is that the EULA where they "own" your mail.

So I am back to my original argument. If you get something for free, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold.

 

[bekdik]

Speaking of Google ads, sometimes automation just gets it wrong!

See bold:

Humpback whale songs spread eastward like the latest pop tune
April 14, 2011

Humpback whales love a good hit single, and every year a new catchy pop tune spreads among the male underwater crooners, said an Australian study.

Humpback whales have their own version of the hit single, according to a study reported online on April 14th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. At any given time within a population, male humpbacks all sing the same mating tune. But the pattern of the song changes over time, with the new and apparently catchy versions of the song spreading repeatedly across the ocean, almost always traveling from west to east.

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"Our findings reveal cultural change on a vast scale," said Ellen Garland, a graduate student at The University of Queensland. Multiple songs moved like "cultural ripples from one population to another, causing all males to change their song to a new version." This is the first time that such broad-scale and population-wide cultural exchange has been documented in any species other than humans, she added.

Link

 

[devilfp]

Google maybe using 'keys' to use adds effectively but if you use Google in a 3rd party mail client you don't see nothing of the adds! Besides the adds on Google is so small compare to any add driven site!

 

[cpu.]

Google maybe using 'keys' to use adds effectively but if you use Google in a 3rd party mail client you don't see nothing of the adds! Besides the adds on Google is so small compare to any add driven site!

What did Google add where?

 

[Arthur]

Judging by the reactions here, Microsoft has a better sense of humour than Google's defensive defenders. Quite a giggle, really.