Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail

'Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail' is the title of a new campaign by Microsoft to try and persuade people that Google Mail is evil and that they should switch to Microsoft's Outlook.com. Microsoft has built a website that explains how "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."


The way that Microsoft describes it, I think some people will assume that Google employees are sitting at desks reading your emails. This is nonsense of course. Literally billions of emails are sent every day and even if Google employed a million people it still wouldn't be enough to read everyone's email messages.

No person reads your emails.

When you read your email you are simply looking at a web page in your web browser. Web pages have adverts and the question is, what adverts should be placed on the page? Thousands of companies advertise products and services through Google, so what Google's email software does is to try to match the content of the email with the content of an advert. If the email contains the words 'photography' and 'camera' then Google's email software will place an advert that also contains the keywords 'photography' and 'camera'. It simply matches keywords in the message with keywords in adverts.

It's computerised, it's dumb, and it's not always right. But is the alternative really better? With Google you get an advert that you just might vaguely be interested in. If you are chatting about digital cameras in an email with a mate, you might see top digital camera deals. Looking at my Yahoo! Mail right now I'm reading an email about Android tablets and the advert next to it is aimed at people retiring with a portfolio of a quarter of a million pounds sterling. Firstly, I'm not retiring. Secondly, I don't have a quarter of a million portfolio. That advert is of no interest to me. Now if it had links to Android tablets I might be tempted to click them.

Personally, I'm not bothered if Google Mail displays adverts based on the content of messages. It's just a dumb computer program that doesn't understand what I'm actually saying and not a real person. What's more, the adverts might actually be useful.

Is this an invasion of privacy as Microsoft claims? What is an invasion of privacy? I think that it would be an invasion of privacy if information contained within emails was passed on to a third party. As far as I am aware, this does not happen. Google stores my emails and no-one else can read them. I don't think a bit of code on the web page that fetches a camera advert if a message contains the word 'camera' is an invasion of privacy. This campaign by Microsoft tells you little of the benefits of Outlook.com or why you might want to use it.

PS. I've had both Outlook (previously Hotmail) and Google Mail accounts for years.