

As Microsoft Shifts Its Privacy Rules, an Uproar Is Absent - nsns
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-expands-gathering-and-use-of-data-from-web-products.html?_r=1&ref=technology

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jiggy2011
An uproar is probably absent because nobody really uses these services.
Anybody remotely tech savvy ditched hotmail years ago and bing has never
really taken off.

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dangrossman
Hotmail is the world's largest webmail service. Bing has 15% of the search
market; Google only has ~4 times that. Let's not pretend nobody uses these
sites.

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jiggy2011
By "nobody" I mean very few people who go on the internet and create uproars.
Hotmail is probably mainly used by grandmas and spammers.

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Toshio
Agreed. Myself and a few tech-savvy friends only use hotmail as a spam
collector, you know, to sign up for one-time stuff that insists on getting a
password from you.

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Mythbusters
I use Hotmail as my primary. Hate gmail UI. Yahoo is really the one I'd like
the most but I have been using Hotmail since ages and love the skydrive
integration.

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tinco
"Company becomes as evil as Google" does not cause much uproar, because people
don't really consider Google evil (yet).

I think what is more interesting is that apparently Microsoft feels it will
make more money of competing with Google head to head with information
revenue, than by 1-upping Google by having a more consumer-oriented privacy
policy.

Would you think, keeping the recently revealed awesome outlook.com in mind, a
good reminder campaign by Microsoft about how they _don't_ invade your privacy
like Google does could have pulled you or your peers away from gmail (or
Google-apps)?

Perhaps that would've been too much risk, this being the obvious easy way of
making revenue..

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mtgx
""Company becomes as evil as Google" does not cause much uproar, because
people don't really consider Google evil (yet)"

But there was an uproar when Google did that, and that's the point of the
article. But I think it's as others have mentioned. People just don't use or
care about Microsoft's services, so there's no one to be outraged by it.

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randomfool
No uproar because the previous uproar was strongly backed by Microsoft. Google
apparently doesn't care about funding a 'Microsoft is a bunch of hypocrites'
campaign, which is probably for the better.

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madrona
Microsoft invests an amazing amount of resources into the creation and
dissemination of FUD. Here's their internal manifesto:
[http://techrights.org/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096....](http://techrights.org/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096.pdf)

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fkdjs
Microsoft realized these privacy rule changes allow for things like google
now, so after criticizing google they realized their stupidity, then copied
google, which is their current business plan as of late. I'm betting they're
working on their own google now clone. So here we have another example of
Microsoft missing the boat. Yet Microsoft tries to get the government to
investigate google for anticopetition. Google is where they are due to being
smarter than their competitors, and this is one of many examples.

The reason for no uproar is Microsoft is better at PR. When google introduced
the privacy changes, Microsoft went into PR overdrive mode. You have to hand
it to microsoft, when it comes to PR, they are innovative.

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NickFitz
Single page link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-
expan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-expands-
gathering-and-use-of-data-from-web-
products.html?_r=2&ref=technology&&pagewanted=all)

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pmb
Microsoft's motto is "Don't be so evil that the government can successfully
break you into pieces". Google's motto is "don't be evil". We expect vile
bullcrap from Microsoft.

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lumberjack
If you read the article, it's talking about how Microsoft changed it's privacy
policies to match those of Google (who where met with uproar at their
introduction) after publicly calling out Google on it's lack of value of
privacy.

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pmb
Right. My claim is: "Google does something evil" is news, "Microsoft does
something evil" is not news.

