14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is once again attacking its Mountain View-based rival Google, this time over some “unfair” practices that it uses on the Gmail email service.
As you probably know by now, Gmail is the biggest rival for Microsoft’s reinvented Outlook.com, so the company is trying every once in a while to show everyone that its very own email service is actually better than Google’s.
Microsoft has thus expanded its previously launched Scroogled campaign to cover Gmail too, revealing that Google didn’t respect users’ privacy, as it provides ads based on the text included in every single email message.
“Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads. And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy. Outlook.com is different – we don’t go through your email to sell ads,” the updated Scroogled campaign reads.
In addition, Microsoft has also launched a petition to “tell Google to stop going through your email to sell ads,” requiring a total of 25,000 signatures from users all over the world.
“Emails are personal — and people feel that reading through their emails to sell ads is out of bounds,” said Stefan Weitz, senior director of Online Services at Microsoft.
“We honor the privacy of our Outlook.com users, and we are concerned that Google violates that privacy every time an Outlook.com user exchanges messages with someone on Gmail. This campaign is as much about protecting Outlook.com users from Gmail as it is about making sure Gmail users know what Google's doing.”
While Outlook.com doesn’t look into every single email to provide ad results to users accessing its email service, Microsoft probably forgets that the subject field and web searches of logged in consumers are still monitored, again with the goal of providing better ads.
Google is yet to issue a comment on this, but given the fact that the company usually chooses not to talk on this kind of attacks, the company will most likely remain tight-lipped once again.