With Microsoft’s rollout of the new Outlook for Windows, it appears the company has transformed its email app into a surveillance tool for targeted advertising.
Everyone talks about the privacy-washing campaigns of Google and Apple as they mine your online data to generate advertising revenue. But now it looks like Outlook is no longer simply an email service; it’s a data collection mechanism for Microsoft’s 801 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself.
↫ Edward Komenda on the Proton blog
Now, note that this is an article written by Proton, posted on the company blog, so of course they’re not going to be too kind towards their competitors. That being said, the article’s not wrong: the new Outlook web application, now the default in Windows, not only shared your data with around 800 partners, it also displays ads inside of the application. On macOS, it will even show yo fake emails that are, in fact, ads.
Furthermore, once you add your accounts to this new Outlook web application, you’ll also be uploading your username and password to Microsoft, giving them access to your email accounts for advertising and data collection purposes, a shady practice a ton of email clients on mobile devices tend to do as well.
Suffice it to say you really shouldn’t be using this new Outlook, and you should make sure friends and family don’t either. This is yet another nail in the coffin of Windows, now an advertising and data collection platform first, and operating system second.
Aren’t the complaints directed at the behaviours of the OWA exactly how the bulk of cloud based apps work, including those on Linux and Apple? The user data is put into the cloud via the browser space which basically leaves it at the mercy of the provider.
I understand the complaints in a discussion of cloud versus desktop, but I don’t get the Outlook specific focus which seems arbitrary, but in the more general context the article explains nicely why I still use the desktop apps.
> but I don’t get the Outlook specific focus which seems arbitrary
Wouldn’t that be because it used to be local running software where users automatically are “upgraded” to the cloud version?
I suppose, but pretty much all the cloud based apps started off as desktop, for many we have no choice now that the desktop version is redundant, it’s not just Outlook.
cpcf,
Indeed. It feels like users are getting tethered to data center apps across the industry. Everywhere we look consumers are being migrated, not necessarily because it benefits us, but because it benefits the companies to force us into services with more tracking, ads, and subscriptions.
It’s the use of the data that is the problem, many users and organisations that have heavily adopted cloud based environments are inadvertently delivering the AI training data that will make many people redundant. On the Dev side pair programming went from two sitting side-by-side to one or more anywhere on the globe at any time, and now one of the pair might be AI, for many tasks it won’t be long before it’s a pair of optimised AI and no human, perhaps a optimised Problem Space AI and a Solution Space AI operating like a GAN. I’ve seen similar in CAD, both mechanical and electronic, some jobs just aren’t going to exist with previously high trained and remunerated specialists in areas like FEA almost disappearing overnight.
The thing is, most people use the software provided by their device for email management.
To my knowledge, this is the first time such software works by uploading your credentials to a cloud service that then fetches and stores the emails, before finally handing them (or not, possibly, with some filters) to the device.
Gmail on android doesn’t do that, Outlook (whichever version) didn’t do that until now, I have a hard time imagining Apple Mail doing that, though I haven’t used it in ages. And the fact that there’s no opt-out blows my mind. I sure as hell won’t go through with MS’s nagging to get me to “upgrade”. When the current mail app for windows stops working, it looks like I’ll go back to Thunderbird, which I didn’t bother to install, but it’s now become much less of a bother than the alternative.
Or I’ll bite the bullet and install a Linux distro on my laptop, but I need to get accustomed to parental controls on there.
worsehappens,
It is not the first time as Gmail, (or Hotmail, or others) allowed IMAP/SMTP logins to 3rd party accounts in their web interface.
But I get your point. A local application usually does not process email like this. The whole point would be missed by moving it to the cloud.
This is exactly how the mobile version of outlook has always worked, although the desktop version never did.
Users are usually not aware that this is happening.
Well, I didn’t know that Outlook already works that way on mobile platforms. And the reason I didn’t know is that I have no reason to use the Outlook mobile email client for any account not based on a M365 or equivalent platform, in which case MS already has the emails and I don’t need to care anymore.
As I said, the main problem here is that this is the default application to handle emails in the monopolistic OS for desktop computers. This IS a pretty big deal, because the level of worldwide communication going through MS servers will come to the same level as what Google sees, difference being the MS is not supposed to be a party in that transmission and none of the actual parties should expect them to be.
Built in spam. We are witnessing the pinnacle of human innovation right now, what a great time to be alive! I can’t wait for my next phone app to ring me up with customized offers without having to subscribe to telemarketing lists.
Looks like we’re well on-course turning the movie Idiocracy into reality. That’s nice.