Newsflash, all webmail providers can do this. That’s the tradeoff for convenience, you leave your email on a remote server where it can be data mined at will.
It isn’t about the fact that they have the technical capability, that much is trivially obvious; it’s about the fact that they’ve been running an insufferable ad campaign for who-knows-how-long-now about how privacytastic they are; but their actual privacy policy consists of 150 pages of output from a Markov process trained on randomly selected legal documents, along with a star chamber that houses adorable kangaroos.
If anything, it’s exactly those situations where an entity’s ability to do something is essentially unfettered that their degree of dishonesty matters most. If they didn’t have the capability, their honesty would be largely irrelevant.
And vice-versa. But this is the 21c - honesty is such a quaint value.
If I had something in a safe deposit box in a bank, could the bank just open it without a court order? I think that would be the scenario to compare here. It’s not really “Microsoft searching itself.” It’s Microsoft giving someone a box to use for themselves and then searching the box.
Can we have some sense of perspective?
In 2012, Microsoft had been alerted to the fact that the blogger, whose identity was kept anonymous in the court papers, had been given some stolen lines of code from the not-yet-released Windows 8 operating system.
The blogger then posted screenshots of the unreleased Windows operating system to his blog.
To figure out the source of the leak, Microsoft began an investigation and, as part of that search, looked into the blogger’s accounts to find out the name of the employee.
Given the TOS you sign when you sign up for a hotmail account, this doesn’t seem that big a deal.
They aren’t data mining every mail you send for advertising like Gmail, they’re pursuing a criminal act…
So you’re saying, a blogger greatly angered Microsoft so they decided to rifle through the blogger’s email account.
Their policy sounds like “we won’t look through your Hotmail messages, unless we really, really want to.”
then they can go make a criminal complaint and someone can get a warrant
Don’t get Fuckedrosoft!
And one of the reasons I refuse to join the lemming-like rush to webmail, and keep on getting my mail the way I have since the 1990s, by downloading it into a mail client on my computer and deleting it off the server.
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