Microsoft ad campaign savages Google over privacy Microsoft is launching a three-day advertising campaign in the US, offering itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Google. Last week Google decided to pool personal user information across 60 of its products with no opt out available to users. The ad campaign's slogan is: "Putting people first" [JPG here]. “Every …
I'm finding Google's single sign on, and ability to switch between accounts a time saving feature. I actually don't really care how much they know about me, since I block the vast majority of their ads anyway. However I'm not very happy that by extension the DHS knows all about me.
Once the info is out of your hands it's opportunity time for someone else to pick it up and, well, do whatever they like with it. Including giving it to someone else. Or, maybe amending their search results "helpfully" for you, affecting you even if you block all their adverts. Thus, it follows, you should care what google knows about you, even if they were in fact not evil at all. So why are you making that distinction? On this level it's untenable.
The few times I've ventured onto the web without an adblock and flashblock the most annoying thing happened, I went to El Reg and a stupid microsoft advert bounced the page up and down, every page I visited. It was unbearable,
If I look at a redundant hotmail account, there are messages form Microsoft everywhere, all with individual links to have to unsubscribe them.
Everything I go to with Microsoft nowadays to do anything useful I seem to have to log in with a Live ID.
In a test Google account I have message every so often warning me that I am sharing y location data via Latitude and making sure I still want to.
I know who gives me the nicer browsing experience out of the two companies and the one who feels less intrusive - it ain't Microsoft!
Yes, I know, Google isn't the pristine angel that some people make it out to be. But when I compare Google against others, Google really wins out.
Google records all sorts of information about me. Then again, so many other agencies do, too. Google has yet to give me a reason to distrust them - unlike Microsoft, and a fair few advertising companies.
I may not trust Google, but I distrust them a whole lot less than the competition. It's the lesser of many evils...
Google doesn't charge me for using their products so I'm more inclined to cut them some slack about tracking my online behaviour because I'm getting lots of stuff in return. Whereas Microsoft makes mega dollars from software sales; advertising revenue isn't their primary source of income.
Some of Microsoft's products are free (IE, Hotmail, Bing, etc...) but until they offer Windows for free like Google offers Chrome OS, or Office for free like Google has done with Google Docs then I'm not prepared to be as lenient with them as I am with Google. Even if they only did it for home users and kept the lucrative corporate market as it currently is then that would be enough to buy my loyalty.
Seems that I'm pretty cheap and Google has bought my soul by offering me stuff for free.
"...increases how valuable you are to an advertiser." True, but this could be read to mean "Google sells your data to advertisers," which is not true. What you get from Google "knowing more about you" (they don't know more about you under the new terms than under the old terms) is a better quality of advert and possibly a better quality of search.
Google is making these changes to compete better with Facebook. Microsoft has invested in Facebook and has partnerships with them. Facebook already knows loads of information about its users, collected from multiple products, and uses them to display adverts. If they decide to use the information to sell adverts outside the facebook.com domain (they don't at the moment AFAIK) then Google would be a loser big time, so they are improving the quality of their ads beforehand.
You can opt out of the social search and you can opt out of Google entirely, with their Google Takeaway service.
"...a better quality of advert..."
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Dear internet [and media at large]
I don't want to see any adverts –ever!
If you really must let me know that you have a product or service available, 'advertise' that fact on your own website, where I can seek out the information, at a time of my choosing. Dropping your crass marketing, unasked for, in the middle of a website, movie, TV programme, book, magazine, email [or whatever else] I'm trying to enjoy is, to me, akin to coming up and shitting on the side of my plate, while I'm trying to eat my dinner –and makes me feel equally as benevolently pre-disposed towards you and whatever you're trying to flog, as that would.
* If I want to know whether your product is any good, I'll compare some independent reviews and decide,based on that.
* If I want to know what it can do to change my life. I'll read up on what features it has and then imagine myself owning that thing.
* If I want to make myself more attractive to members of the opposite sex, I'll try developing my personality, keeping in shape and washing occasionally –not depend on the fact I carry around your device to act like some kind of pheromone spray.
* If I want to know whether your prices are better than anyone else's, I'll look at your price, look at other peoples' prices and then, using my knowledge of advanced mathematics, see which number is smallest.
Oh, and by the way, when you made me play 'eeny-meey-miny-mo' before deciding whether to tick the box on your website which said "Do not uncheck the not checking of this box if you don't want to not avail of not having not opted into opting out of checking this box", that didn't constitute me making an informed decision to receive daily spam from you for the next millenium
That is all.
madra
[Now with 23% extra commentardiness!]
Problem is it is getting to the point where you need to be logged in to set certain opt outs.
Managing multiple accounts is a nightmare.
The search is crap. (Occasionally it corrects a typo which would be useful - 99% of the time it searches for the totally wrong thing). With verbatim it should correct common typo's still.
What makes it so bad is there is no alternative.
(Also there is the problem with such situations as interest in the stilll not available "Official" goatse.cx memorabilia - don't want Google advertising the fake stuff - especially on work related machines.)
...who can tell you what programs you were running when you last installed an update. Or what the last dozen files you opened were.
Google told you that they read your email and show you ads. Any news on what Microsoft does with that data? Anything from Yahoo!? Or perhaps one of the other ad agencies, the ones with the flash cookies or the sneaky redirects?
This post has been deleted by its author
It's actually possible for the website to record the ad being shown and if you clicked on the ad or not. Not something supported by Google, but nothing a bit of JavaScript doen't solve. It's already done in tools such as asRep and OpenX.
Now of course this may be something Google doesn't want people to know about...
All those going on about AdBlock. That's NOT the point. The point is the information they collect about you and who has access to that information.
Given an 18 month search history it is quite possible to determine EXACTLY who that person is, including where they live, their name, phone number and so on. This happened a few years back when AOL "accidentally" published their "anonymous" search data. Some old biddy in god knows where was rather taken aback when a reporter contacted her saying she'd searched for "viagra side effects" on the 16th March 2008 or whenever. The reporter determined all this purely from the search history, not IP addresses (which had been anonoymised) or anything else.
To be honest.. Google does provide a very easy target right now. For example, just go to their new policy page and read through it, here:
http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/preview/
Notice anything odd? No? Ok, here's a hint: "Last modified: March 1, 2012 (view archived versions) ".
errrr, its like the first of Februari today (time of writing) wtf ?
Windows Live ID
"If you are the user of an associated account, the holder of the service account has full control over your associated account. This includes the right to .. request and receive machine and service use information related to your associated account"
http://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/code-of-conduct/default.aspx
If I did not have my Google I would not be here tonight
If I did not have my Google I might not think I was right
If I did not have my Google I might not be such a pest
Since I got my Google I've become like all the rest
Google is such a dirty word
Google is such a dirty word
Google is such a dirty word
Better believe everything that you've heard
GOOGLE!
as an online advertiser, i'm amazed at how stupid these comments are...
are you joking? ad blocker? hahahaha...
i can insert messaging in your inbox, banner ads on sites, send you emails, even deliver junk mail to your house with a phone number or email reverse lookup. you're going to block it? my cookies will respawn. i can see where you are with your android phone and target you at your existing location. send you a text message, put a banner on an application you are running.
you'll block me? uh-huh... and i'll get you with .js or flash.
and i have all of your data PERMANENTLY. i can drill down to you, your family, and your friends with google+ ... i know your kid's school. your church or scout troop.
and ... i see all of the sites you visited before you hit my site / sites / ad. i see where you go after.
but best of all ... since google keeps every keystroke you have every typed while you are logged in (even while using other sites) ... all the government DOESN'T have access to is your DNA. but they'll have it soon.
>>i can insert messaging in your inbox, banner ads on sites, send you emails, even deliver junk mail to your house with a phone number or email reverse lookup. you're going to block it? my cookies will respawn.
Sure you're an advertiser and don't know much about MTA business as well as the email standards. "Inserting messaging" would be a disaster. All advertising is done in javascript on the client-side . With gmail you can switch to plain html (some good feature would be unavailable though). You will never see it through IMAP4 or POP3. An ad banner cannot be added unless you use editor embedded in the web browser with javascript. No server-side insertion is allowed. Think about pgp-signitures failing due to some insertion like these.
You can put all adds in the spam-filter. gmail's is Bayesian in nature (maybe a var. of spamassassin). In case google tampers with the settings, get your own to filter the incoming mail. With 2 gmail accounts I almost never get any spam, the false-positive is almost 0.
Well AMOF, when I was using google's webmail client it wasn't that invasive as yahoo for example.
What about that "Preserve Favorites Data" in IE when you try to delete stuff. Lots of people don't figure out for a while that the cookies are not being deleted.
That being said, I'm getting a little tired of the direction Google is going; I sign out of Google immediately after checking my mail, no more following me around.
The little "not signed in message, you're missing out" on the new tab page of Chrome is a little rude for a data collector to say.
"Join the hundreds of millions of people who enjoy not worrying about the content of their private emails being used to serve ads," is what the infographic cries out. So we could assume that all ads that show up in Hotmail are selected at random, with no account of what kind of user would view them, right?
http://advertising.microsoft.com/windows-live-hotmail?tab=profile
that seems to tell me otherwise, and the interesting thing is they got their demographics from two statistics companies. They still know your gender, age, marital status, income, and online shopping habits. How is that respecting privacy?
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