Google reads your email, shocker
THE SHY and retiring, softly spoken, Microsoft CEO Steve " All Quiet on the Western Front" Ballmer has accused Google of reading punter's emails.
Miming to the throngs in Blighty, Steve told a crowd that one of the differences between the evil empire of Google and the Glorious Empire of Vole, upon which the jelly never sets, was that the Vole didn't read your email.
Somehow Ballmer managed to slip the comments in on a discussion of consumer software revenue models, so he must have been feeling a bit bored.
It all started when an audience member asked him if an advertising model
could support software business in the future.
Ballmer quietly replied he always fancied a combination of models. Don't we all?
He said it was really tricking to make cash out of email and Google has had the same problems even though "it read your mail and Microsoft doesn't".
There were shocked gasps from the crowd who, being British, were not used to such colonial directness.
Ballmer pointed out that he was not defaming Google as it was a factual statement. However he pointed out that Google's privacy was not working out as well as the company thought.
On the other hand, nowhere does Google say that it reads emails and we would have thought that Ballmer might lose out on an absence of malice defence in any defamation case. µ
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It think Google did say keep all the e-mail, even it is deleted.
where do the context-sensitive ads come from?
A computer reads your email to generate the ads. No persons at Google read your email. the ads. http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29433&topic=8264&security=1
Didn't google say they were gonna read emails to provide appropriate ads?

Well done for pointing out the obvious steve.
Several yonks ago an evil roomate mucked around in my volemail on account of the default settings on a shared computer, and I mailed him about this and pointed out that either he was evil and must be destroyed; or that MS was evil and must be destroyed on account of just deciding settings for their customers.
Less than half an hour had passed when MS sent me some charmingly phrased helpful advice on default settings, which was obviously keyword generated as a complaint. Sometimes I question the wisdom of my questioning anything.
would they have targeted advertisements towards the content of your email? They said they were doing this from the beginning
@ Niklas,

I believe that while reading the initial EULA for gmail, Google mentioned that it electronically scans the email for keywords for the adverts. I dont know if this really counts as reading.
Google has stated several times that it "reads" the emails, in order to target advertising.
From GMail Terms of Service:

Google Mail serves relevant ads using a completely automated process that enables Google to effectively target dynamically changing content, such as email. No human will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or other information without your consent, and no email content or other personally identifiable information will be provided to advertisers as part of the Service.
Google's "Systems" read your e-mail in order to provide you with targeted ADs.
Microsoft grants access to full hotmail emails to many (not to say all) technical Staff, at least, from call centers.

Seams that they can't see the password, but depending on permissions, they can see entire mails or subjets only.

At least, most of Teleperformance telemarketers that works for Microsoft in Argentina can do that, so i guess, also, they do this worldwide.

So, anyone that works for Vole in any way, have access to your e-mails....

Thats is Microsoft privacy.

Offcourse that Telemarketers are forced to deny this, but, believeme, this is not a joke.
Wow, that's a tough one. I don't know, bots?
This is not news, it has been well known for years that their software searches through all our mail to find some sort of context to generate their ads. That is completely different then a human actually reading it.

Did Rupert Murdoch buy this place? The quality of journalism is sinking fast.

...from a machine...maybe...

Cut out the paranoia, completely dumb
there are organization much more powerful than google that already know your name, your wife's name, the school you attended, your marital status and the jobs you've had in the past...yup that's call the gvnt...too late to be paranoid...sorry get over it
So how exactly does Microsoft do spam filtering if it doesn't "read your e-mail"?
Google doesn't "read" your email. Get real. You think they pay a guy to sit there and sift through your worthless inbox? all of the thousands of gmail users?

It's called a computer program. They feed your mail through a program that scans for certain words and phrases. When these words and phrases are found, it puts out the "context sensitive" ads you see.

So, no, human beings do not sit down with a fresh cup of coffee and excitedly toil over your inbox. So they read your mail insofar as a machine reads it.

So you think your ISP doesn't read your email, and your work, when you get it there. And lets not even mention the "E" word - outloud. No, there was nothing goin on with those fibre taps into the At&T closet , now was there?
I remember a few years back a stink concerning MS having in their T&Cs somewhere that all traffic through there network would be the property of them, including if you emailed say a document of an invention technically they would have the right to then say it is theirs and they would be within their rights to then patent it. Or have I imagined this?
How else would they scan for spam? ISPs scan your e-mails for spam. Your computer scans your e-mail for spam. Hotmail, Yahoo, etc... scan your e-mail for spam. I don't see how someone would call this "reading" your e-mail. Is there ever a human behind a console somewhere reading the text of your e-mails as they come in to your free provider?

I highly doubt it. The claim makes no sense, as any "reading" done by Google is done by Microsoft as well. Machines can't read.

Google policy on "reading" e-mails: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29433&topic=8264&security=1

You also have to agree to them scanning your e-mails for context sensitive ads before you sign up.
It is clear the the Caribbean Community is outraged over the comments that Google reads emails. 

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...unlike Microsoft. Since my hotmail account got hijacked by hackers, I can't access my email, and Microsoft say "they won't do anything about it". So the hacker gets full access to my email account, and I get none.

Unless you really enjoy Kafka-esque nightmares, NEVER USE MICROSOFT EMAIL.
Before he says anything about anyone, he should remember that Microsoft itself spies on everybody who is using Windows
What I find funny, is when a Microsoft CEO (owner of Hotmail) starts a rumour on his competitor, hoping to get more people to his own service. Which is (from my point of view), a huge proof that Microsoft is failing and doesn't know where to put his cards anymore.
A friend of mine's father took a little while to die recently. I got email updates on his progress sent from a (Microsoft owned) Hotmail account. Each email had a small ad at the end. Finally I got the message that 'dad died last night ...'. Lo and behold the hotmail ad was

"Advertisement: Win Dad the Footy Final with Cadbury Favourites!"

Concidence? I think not.
For your question, Niklas, here is an answer by Google : http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=39382

It's a link I found right under those context-sensitive ads. Clicking it lead me there.

Hope I still proved once again that Gmail is better than Hotmail.
there is a Google employee sitting there reading your email, assigning advertisments based on what the employee thinks is appropriate. That is how Google Adsense works as well:- Google employees read every web page that has Adsense enabled and tag the pages. Its not automated or anything
Wouldnt be anything to do with googles spam filter, which kinda works, therefore its readable. 
Who uses hotmail anyway?



They have created the biggest data-mining operation in history. Every last move is tracked; information is taken from everything and from everywhere. Your information is bought, sold and traded with every other data-miner they can. Nothing is deleted ever. Until they offer REAL privacy options to account holders (even if it's at a premium,) such as the ability to truly delete something completely from their servers, opt-out of profile building, prevent message scanning, the holding onto search queries and partial IP addresses for eternity. With governments around the world moving toward draconian law and desperate corporations that are facing out-dated industrial models. This is the worst time to give up your privacy for the most dime- a-dozen of all things (email, search, maps, video hosting, etc.) Boycott Google!
Google keeps the email for 90 days (I think that's the length of time) after they are deleted, most probably for security reasons. (Example: NSA has a 'lead' that some person is a 'terrorist' and thinks their email contains vital information to saving lives. It would be kept in case the person deleted it and it were removed from the servers immediately, opting to simply memorize or print out the information. Then again, every single email provider out there does the same thing. There is a minimum time limit that email has to be kept on the servers, [again, 90 days, I think] for the sake of 'safety'.)

As for the context-sensitive ads, those are from automated scanning for key words. Do you really think that Google is going to employ enough people to read each and every email out there to add ads to it? I alone receive 30-40 emails per day (non-spam) on my gmail address, and many of my friends are the same. I also send just as many as I receive, more often than not, and considering most of the people I send to are on gmail accounts, I alone offer 50-100 emails per day.

I don't know if I'm on the high side or the low side, but considering the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people using gmail, trying to read even 1% of the email going through each day would be impossible financially, even for Microsoft and Google (they could afford to do so for the short term, but the cost of paying people to do so would be so great that it would be impossible to maintain it for very long. A week, at most, is my guess before they would see a serious hit to their income.)

Besides, if they DID have people reading each email to add ads, they could do better with deleting the spam before it reaches my in box...
Depends on how you define 'read'. Microsoft's Hotmail service 'reads' your e-mail when it scans it for spam and viruses. Google 'reads' your e-mail when it serves up ads. The difference? You can see the effects of one and not of the other. No difference, neither of them are being 'read' by human beings.

More FUD from Microsoft.
Well, in my case, it can't, since I'm not using Outlook.
But that does not keep Ballmer from keeping a tab on my hardware by lifting the unique IDs of all my cards, motherboard and hard disks.
It doesn't keep Ballmer from wanting info on my kernel and whatever else he sees fit to take when yet another application crash occurs.
And it does not keep him from pushing overly intrusive Genuine Advantage crap that kills honest people's PCs more than it bothers pirates.
Whereas Google doesn't read my email any more than Ballmer does, since I don't have a Gmail account either (and I have been offered, thank you).
So as it stands, I'll go with Google over MS any day.

Pascal.
In the Hotmail EULA, they reserve the right to use any ideas that you discuss over their E-mail. If they don't read it, why is that in there?
So am I to assume that Steve B was talking about the non-human scanning of email when he referred to "read" emails (which Google stated clearly about in their Ts&Cs)?

If so, and going on his alleged statement, "it read your mail and Microsoft doesn't", that MS categorically do not scan emails sent through his company's service?
They can read my boring e-mails anytime, just stop stuffing the search pages with sponsored "noise" instead of the data I'm searching for. I've pretty much stopped using Google and I urge others to boycott them until they clean up their act.