Microsoft Ending Scroogled Ad Campaign

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When it comes to Google, people don't seem to care about privacy, at least not enough to get them to switch away from Gmail.

Microsoft spokespeople are still warning anyone who will listen that Google is reading its users' email and delivering biased results in Google Shopping. But it has stopped buying the controversial Scroogled ads on television, in newspapers, and social media. "That part is about finished," Stefan Weitz, Microsoft senior director of online services, said on Thursday.
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I been both Scroogled and Microfucked.

No one gives a flying squirrel about your privacy. These salesmen would sell their own mothers if it'd made the shareholders happy.
 
Terminus said:
I been both Scroogled and Microfucked.

No one gives a flying squirrel about your privacy. These salesmen would sell their own mothers if it'd made the shareholders happy.
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Funny, I work at Microsoft on privacy tools development. My former manager went to Google to work on their privacy team. When you make such blanket statements about either company, you're clearly talking out of a hole other than your mouth.
 
if microsoft would clone gmail without reading my email, then I would use their shit
 
dr.kevin said:
if microsoft would clone gmail without reading my email, then I would use their shit
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Part of the outlook push for the scroogled campaign was exactly that. The team committed to not using data analytics on personal email for advertising. From http://www.scroogled.com/OurPosition

Outlook.com only scans the contents of your email to help protect you and display, categorize, and sort your mail appropriately. Just like the postal service sorts and scans mail and packages for dangerous explosives and biohazards, Outlook.com scans your mail to help prevent spam, gray mail, phishing scams, viruses, malware, and other dangers and annoyances.

Microsoft and its email services, including Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Office 365, do not use the content of customers’ private emails, communications, or documents to target advertising.
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It was a change from the previous policy of "they're doing it, so we should, too"; I was glad to see it come from that team. I don't like the attack ad campaign, but I do like the reason behind it.
 
Terminus said:
I been both Scroogled and Microfucked.

No one gives a flying squirrel about your privacy. These salesmen would sell their own mothers if it'd made the shareholders happy.
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Pretty sure that the stock market is one place that bad publicity is actually bad publicity. If the headline comes across "google getting hit with $120b lawsuit by the DOJ for privacy violations", the shareholders would not be happy.

Whether the government, the same ones that allow unwarranted wiretaps and indefinite incarceration, cares about your privacy is a different matter.
 
Tawnos said:
Part of the outlook push for the scroogled campaign was exactly that. The team committed to not using data analytics on personal email for advertising. From http://www.scroogled.com/OurPosition



It was a change from the previous policy of "they're doing it, so we should, too"; I was glad to see it come from that team. I don't like the attack ad campaign, but I do like the reason behind it.
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This is the reason I have mulled switching over.
 
heh.. Personally I dont mind google's advertising.. I mean seriously they can read my email & I get advertising for computer parts & gun related stuff, or they don't & I get advertising for tampons.. Seriously I would rather the annoying ass adds at least be tailored to me..
 
Tawnos said:
Part of the outlook push for the scroogled campaign was exactly that. The team committed to not using data analytics on personal email for advertising. From http://www.scroogled.com/OurPosition



It was a change from the previous policy of "they're doing it, so we should, too"; I was glad to see it come from that team. I don't like the attack ad campaign, but I do like the reason behind it.
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I guess the "team" wasn't committed enough then since Outlook.com still does targeted ads based on subject line of email, as well as all the sign up / profile info (age/sex/location/etc)

MS really needs to focus on building better products rather than whining about the competition being further ahead. Boneheaded decisions like hiring a former political campaign strategist to come up with these silly attack campaigns are turning people off. Every single one has backfired.
 
I have never once even noticed Google's ad banners. I couldnt even tell you exactly where one is. I think I saw one once, in plain text, about 5 words long, somewhere at the top of my email list, but completely obscured by the Gmail skin. Google has done a good job and providing totally non-invasive advertising, to the point that I'm surprised advertisers even use them due to lack of footprint.

Google has also earned a reputation as a truthworthy company, in ALL endeavors. While Microsoft may not have ever read someone's email to shill ads in your inbox, they HAVE engaged in numerous clandestine activities throughout the years and screwed their customers on numerous occasions. Microsoft has shown themselves to be in this for the money and nothing else. They are a reactionary company, not an innovative one. Therefore I will NEVER give them the benefit of doubt and trust them with anything until they give me damn good reason to do so, and as a result they will always be runner up to absolutely any software/hardware I use for the rest of my life. I'm not saying I wont or dont use them, I'm just saying I use them when all other options have failed.
 
No one is "reading" anything. It's a line of code on a machine. Not some guy reading your emails.

How stupid do they think people are. Microsoft has taken a really stupid turn recently, back to doing stupid stuff and committing endless PR suicides. They need a good clean out of all the morons they've accumulated.
 
Tawnos said:
Funny, I work at Microsoft on privacy tools development. My former manager went to Google to work on their privacy team. When you make such blanket statements about either company, you're clearly talking out of a hole other than your mouth.
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The problem is there are too many old timers stuck in the 90's frame of mind that Micro$haft sucks! And the new kids just want their media etc. and literally don't care about sacrificing privacy - so you're preaching to deaf ears for ~80% of the population. Too few with a real "open" frame of mind.
 
heh.. Personally I dont mind google's advertising.. I mean seriously they can read my email & I get advertising for computer parts & gun related stuff, or they don't & I get advertising for tampons.. Seriously I would rather the annoying ass adds at least be tailored to me..
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I agree I would rather google know what I have been looking for to make the correct ads come out instead of ads for something I do not care about. I do care about my privacy but I would be more worried with facebook then google. We run an email service and privacy is a big play for us but we use adsense since they target what our members are looking for we had used other ad companies but they do not get the clicks since it is not interest based.
 
99% of all people who claim they hate google's constant monitoring of them really don't care and go back to using google anyways. MS is going to have a hard time wrenching people away from them. Once most people get into their habbits its really hard to convince them to move away from them.
 
I don't care about some computer scanning my boring-ass emails. It's shitty ad campaigns attempting to look like consumer activism that offends me.
 
So that's what those ads were about? I thought they were feminine hygiene commercials and tuned them out.
 
If I want to rely important information , I do not use Gmail or any mail client for that matter. I use an encrypted service to send and receive messages that are truly private.

But for everything else I couldn't care less what Google does with my email to target advertisements I couldn't give a shit about towards me.

MS tried to make a big deal out of this but the reality is that adverts are everywhere you go on the Net. We've simply gotten use to them. It use to be that adverts would negatively impact our internet surfing speeds but now that broadband is widespread that issue isn't an issue anymore.
 
It's kinda hard to do spam filtering if the email client doesn't 'read your email.' Microsoft does the exact same thing, and that kinda throws the whole privacy argument out the window.

As for the targeted ads, who cares?
 
Steve said:
When it comes to Google, people don't seem to care about privacy, at least not enough to get them to switch away from Gmail.
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People just realize that while Google does "read" their emails, so does every other email service out there. And who looks at online ads anyway? They can "target" me all they want, still doesn't make me buy anything.
 
yeah the "they read your emails" didn't speak to me because I know it is just a keyword search algorithm.

I do think MS did a good job taking Google to task with their PAID google shopping index. I still use google shopping, but I know also use others, since google's is no longer impartial.

The only thing that really bugs me about google (and amazon) is their dislike of certain legal activities. Like firearms and tobacco. Amazon/woot/ will sell gun accessories but post a deal on an actual gun and it gets booted. Google will serve me ads for gun accesories, but not guns. I don't get it, online gun sales are heavily regulated, so it isn't like some scumbag is skirting the law by buying a gun from an online merchant (since it still has to get shipped to an FFL and processed as an instore purchase.)

If they will sell me booze online, and cigars online, why not cigarettes and firearms.
 
"but I NOW* also use others, since google's is no longer impartial." - stupid lack of proofreading
 
gossipninja1 said:
The only thing that really bugs me about google (and amazon) is their dislike of certain legal activities. Like firearms and tobacco. Amazon/woot/ will sell gun accessories but post a deal on an actual gun and it gets booted. Google will serve me ads for gun accesories, but not guns. I don't get it, online gun sales are heavily regulated, so it isn't like some scumbag is skirting the law by buying a gun from an online merchant (since it still has to get shipped to an FFL and processed as an instore purchase.)
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Probably because if some crazy got their gun from Amazon and shot up someplace theyd get a load of negative publicity and tighter controls, which would cost them a bunch of money. So the risk isn't worth the reward. Plus the extra system/contracts with places for legal paperwork to sell someone a firearm would erode the profits.
 
I was loading an HTPC computer for a friend this weekend. The default search was set to Bing. I searched for VLC Media player. I clicked the first link because it looked official and instead it tried to download a "special" version with tons of spyware on it. I saw this right away and cancelled it. I searched on google after that and the first link was the actual VLC page. Bing can be dangerous!
 
jpcahn said:
I was loading an HTPC computer for a friend this weekend. The default search was set to Bing. I searched for VLC Media player. I clicked the first link because it looked official and instead it tried to download a "special" version with tons of spyware on it. I saw this right away and cancelled it. I searched on google after that and the first link was the actual VLC page. Bing can be dangerous!
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The top 2 are ads, not official pages. The actual link is in the real top link.
 
jpcahn said:
I was loading an HTPC computer for a friend this weekend. The default search was set to Bing. I searched for VLC Media player. I clicked the first link because it looked official and instead it tried to download a "special" version with tons of spyware on it. I saw this right away and cancelled it. I searched on google after that and the first link was the actual VLC page. Bing can be dangerous!
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http://i.imgur.com/NlzqXvJ.png

What?
 
Tawnos said:
Double what?

http://i.imgur.com/CfrpY5n.png

Google puts the ads at the top. Bing puts them on the right, so they won't accidentally get confused with the search results.
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Y0hDPK9.png
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Y0hDPK9.png
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That's bizarre. I don't get that on any of my machines using FF (though I see that one scummy ad at the top in IE). There are three ads are on the right, the first two are the ones at the top of your search results, the last is your first ad.

I wonder if we're connecting to different versions of the Bing server with different deployments, since the continuous integration process scales up that way.
 
Tawnos said:
That's bizarre. I don't get that on any of my machines using FF (though I see that one scummy ad at the top in IE). There are three ads are on the right, the first two are the ones at the top of your search results, the last is your first ad.

I wonder if we're connecting to different versions of the Bing server with different deployments, since the continuous integration process scales up that way.
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Notice my search string is different. I get the same results as you when I use the same one you did.
 
Here's what I notice re: searching "vlc player", besides the fact Bing's results page design seems carbon copied from Google - color scheme, layout, fonts, etc. No originality. Pathetic.

The most obnoxious thing I see with Bing, other than the fact theyve carbon copied Google's layout/color scheme/etc, is Bing tries harder to deliberately blend the ad results in with the regular results, and in the example of searching "vlc player" it preys on the unsuspecting and technically illiterate since its harder to notice they're clicking on ads when they end up with a garbage download full of spyware/adware.

Conversely, Google's beige background and "Ads related to vlc player" heading at the top make it much more obvious what the ads are.

So the scumbag award in this instance goes to Bing (surprise)

EFrzkb4.jpg
 
DeathPrincess said:
Probably because if some crazy got their gun from Amazon and shot up someplace theyd get a load of negative publicity and tighter controls, which would cost them a bunch of money. So the risk isn't worth the reward. Plus the extra system/contracts with places for legal paperwork to sell someone a firearm would erode the profits.
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Amazon doesn't sell weapons because it lacks the mechanism of handling transfers between FFL dealers unlike www.gunbroker.com

So it has nothing to do with "crazy" getting their hands on guns from Amazon. It has to do with following the law and Amazon's system is a lot different than those gun dealer websites.
 
odditory said:
Here's what I notice re: searching "vlc player", besides the fact Bing's results page design seems carbon copied from Google - color scheme, layout, fonts, etc. No originality. Pathetic.
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Are you high? It's text and links, not much to differentiate color or font wise...The main difference I see is that Bing provides direct links to the downloads page as well as links to the potentially important sub pages of the main URL. Google only does that for the ad! If you're looking for something to bash about us, you could at least pick something where it doesn't sound like you're just trying to bash a product without substance in your bashing.

The most obnoxious thing I see with Bing, other than the fact theyve carbon copied Google's layout/color scheme/etc, is Bing tries harder to deliberately blend the ad results in with the regular results, and in the example of searching "vlc player" it preys on the unsuspecting and technically illiterate since its harder to notice they're clicking on ads when they end up with a garbage download full of spyware/adware.

Conversely, Google's beige background and "Ads related to vlc player" heading at the top make it much more obvious what the ads are.
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Funny thing about that screenshot. On one of my monitors, the bing ad space is easier to see, on the other, the google ad space is easier to see. I suppose that means I should do a bit better color balancing, but neither are particularly visible to me.
 
Tawnos said:
Are you high? It's text and links, not much to differentiate color or font wise...
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Are you blind??

It looks VERY different, and there is no way that just a tiny corner highlight looks more different than an entire different color background, with a disclaimer directly on top, unless you are using a non broken monitor for bing, and a completely broken one for chrome, while also worshipping MS.
 
Revdarian said:
Are you blind??

It looks VERY different, and there is no way that just a tiny corner highlight looks more different than an entire different color background, with a disclaimer directly on top, unless you are using a non broken monitor for bing, and a completely broken one for chrome, while also worshipping MS.
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Bing ad squares have a green background and clearly say "Ads".
 
Google and Bing have very distinct differences that you can obviously tell. Bing clearly marks all their advertisements as "ads" with a line to indicate how long the list is as well as having ads on the side. Google on the other hand says "Ads related to" and there's simply no indications how many ads there are in the page. Take the "vlc media player" search string for example. In google, they have a 5 star rating on the advertised link which can give misleading impressions that it's the official website. Especially when they are highlighting words that matches the search string. Bing on the other hand does not do that and helps gives you links to the official VLC downloads on top of that.

This is from my perspective of how I see it.
 
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