Outlook got updated on my iPhone last night and now they want me to agree to having my data shared with 807 partners.
Important note: I don’t use outlook as my primary email provider. I use Proton with a custom domain but I keep outlook for some old emails.
Ridiculous. How can someone write “we value your privacy” and then share data with 807 partners. If I share anything with 8 people I pretty much consider it public information already, unless I have a very good reason to trust them. Sharing something with 807 companies is probably less private than taking all that data, putting it up on a billboard, and placing that billboard next to the busiest place in town.
807 is too big for a typical auditorium.
Imagine an auditorium filled to capacity with people standing at the back and crouching in the rows. At the front of the auditorium a Microsoft spokesman is saying “Ok partners, here’s the confidential data. Make sure nobody shares it beyond this room. Ok, so David wrote a letter to his mother Nancy on March 2nd, which included the keywords ‘prostate’, ‘cancer’ and ‘diagnosis’. If you’d like to use those words to show David some ads, go right ahead – but make sure nobody beyond this room knows this confidential information. Next up is Martha…”
There is a monetary value in what you want to keep private, so of course they value your privacy.
And what exactly qualifies as “legitimate interest”?
That ist something I ask myself, too. It’s so irritating, having to decline all these greasy fingered little fuckers one-by-one. That is just a way for me, nowadays, to delete the app completely.
I think this is so they can have it auto toggled on per some EU regulations, forcing you to go through and untoggle every single one with “legitimate interest”.
It’s what I assume, anyway
“Legitimate interest” refers to that which lawmakers have considered to be the “legitimate interest” of private companies, that is, making money selling your data. “Illegitimate interest” would probably be using your private information to blackmail you.
Just curious what you’re up to, bud
Something utterly deranged, which is why I care about my privacy. I swear to god if Mozilla starts indexing my mail to train their crappy AI project, I will lose it.
I’m legitimately interested in getting the bank account & sort code details of Elon, Bezos, Arnault, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ballmer, Buffet, Ellison, Page, and Brin.
Doublespeak
You should know better than to resort to whores with 807 partners. you’ve gone past the red flag into the red zone territory.
Off course they “value” your privacy. They sell and profit so much value out of your privacy
Do you pay for email? If so this is wrong. If not, it’s how you pay for email.
Fair enough, they sell access to your eyeballs to their real customers, the advertisers.
But, what isn’t fair is that it’s 807 “partners”. This isn’t 807 different brands who might want to advertise to you, it’s far more than that. This is 807 different “partners” among whom are Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. who then each go on to sell access to their hundreds of thousands of advertisers.
You can’t expect to have a meaningful privacy policy when you’re sharing that data with 807 different entities.
The way I see it, they have us over a barrel. Unless there’s law on the books that says you can’t do that, your recourse is to pay for email or setup your own mail server. Good luck getting others to trust that though. I guess you could pay for a 3rd party cert.
I run my own mail server. It’s a pain in the ass and I don’t recommend it. But, trust isn’t really the issue, and the only certs I use are from Let’s Encrypt.
What about web hosting these days? Time was you’d get email as part of that deal, with your own custom domains. Have they farmed that out to services like Gmail etc?
I pay for it - family plan. The screen after this is about where I want my ads shown in the app…a paying customer shouldn’t be seeing ads.
Agreed. This is wrong.
Clearly you don’t pay ms enough so the poor megacorp have to sell your data to their 807 partners to scrape by.
“We value your privacy” in the same way my dog values a steak dipped in peanut butter.
And by “steak” you mean your penis?
It used to be 797
800ish entities is not “partners”.
“Partners” are people you could invite to site around a conference table with you. For it to be a partnership, you need to be able to have a meaningful discussion among all the different partners. 800ish is even too big for an auditorium where you’re presenting to all your “partners”. 800ish is a small arena.
Those aren’t partners.
I get what you’re saying, but that’s what it’s called in business. They are usually called “affiliates” more formally, and they provide ancillary income to a business. The whole thing is a partnership - I give you traffic and you give me some money if they convert.
Source: am in marketing and that’s just how it works.
Yeah, but it’s bullshit and I’m calling it out, and I’ll continue to call it out, so stop it.
the reject all button should atleast be normalized
atleast
Not a word.
be normalized
The default for sure.
Not a word.
So they missed the space bar, do you really need to be a douchenozzle about it?
I love how they just say “we value your privacy” and then list out half of their means of data collection. Microsoft ain’t even trying anymore.
This kind of doublespeak has become the standard for corporate bullshittery.
At this point, ANY communication from service providers that starts out like this is just another way for them to screw you for profit.
They learned it from politics. Anything ‘for the children’…
That’s how they sold us the Patriot Act, ‘for OUR safety’…
FUUUUCK it makes me so ANGRY I taste blood…
It’s a typo. They meant to say “we put value on your privacy.” As in dollars and cents.
Cops say they’re there to protect and serve.
And while we’re on that subject, all C-suite execs are bastards too.
It’s not that they now changed something with data collection and sharing within the update. They always did it, all services free of charge do it and most that cost money likely take the extra money as well.
It’s now that they tell you in a short and informative way (1st sentence) and ask for your consent.
What’s really infuriating, are websites and services that have an “Accept All” button but no “Reject All”. Instead you have to manage individually and sometimes I have to flip 30 separate buttons to disable data sharing, where they even call advertisers a ‘necessary 3rd party’ requiring interaction on top.
There are extensions for that.
In Firefox Consent-o-matic and Ghostry both do a good job in android and Linux/Windows.
I have no idea if they have that on iOS though given Apple forces browser makers to reskin Webkit.
I always flip the 30 buttons and then accidentally click Accept All because it’s in the place that I would expect the Confirm My Choices button to be and I am tired of looking at all the buttons and don’t read the most important one. I always tell myself I’ll slow down next time, but I’m just trying to get to the stupid website to read whatever stupid link I clicked on so I’m impatient every time.
This is by design. It’s called dark patterns.
Yep and I hate it
That was a loophole to the original GDPR. That’s now against the law in the EU, but bringing cases against all these sites is time consuming.
Now they need to make asking for ID to access or delete data illegal.
There is usually now a “reject all but essential” button. Well, it’s an improvement.
I did one once where it was like 400 toggles. Took me 10 minutes. I did it just to see how ridiculous it was. I don’t remember what site it was but I definitely never went back.
Wait… is this real or parody? At this point I can no longer tell…
Reality has become parody. There’s no difference anymore.
Oh it’s very real. Microsoft is one of the absolute worst companies for amount of raw data they hoover up.
Don’t believe it? Try logging into the Outlook Web client with uBlock or uMatrix turned on and look at the number of requests it stops.
Lmao you’re personal info is getting a train ran on it 🤣 😂
It’s worse than that meme.
… You know the one.
You mean the girl with 5 black dudes
See, I told you that you knew the one.
chad europe union, to expose that shit
I love so many things that EU has done especially with GDPR But then they come up with this crap and you wonder what they were thinking
I think the intend here is pretty obvious? I also think the reaction over it is kinda overblown.
I totally understand the intention. It just doesn’t work irl. Especially with youghurt and milk cartons. I assume they will do the same to detergents too?
I buy a pack of juice each week that has the same cap and it’s absolutely no problem at all. I honestly don’t know how it “doesn’t work” for you.
Although exaggerated, this guy sums it up pretty well
https://youtu.be/twhYOMQ4MPw?si=r8Ri2RZOOUob5uez
Also i live in a country with a quite well functioning recycling system so loose caps or bottles or even cans is not really an issue.
So i guess the frustration is mostly at making a solution to a problem that was not there. And at best applying a solution across the whole eu to a problem that maybe is not there in all countries
I like it especially on the milk cartons. They really don’t matter if you pour it into something to drink like my coffee.
Do you actually wonder?
Those caps get lost way less and since the bottles themselves usually get recycled now the caps also stay in the cycle.
And it took me like 5 bottles to get used to it.
Even a slow learner should get it sooner or later.This looks great! I wish we had this in Australia.
They were thinking that those caps were among the top items found littering beaches. So they put forward this measure to attempt to curb that issue.
Nobody should be buying single use bottles anyway if there are alternatives available. Maybe that’s the quiet part - making them less attractive to consumers
Drinking from a can only works from one side, so I guess think of it that way.
Nobody should be buying single use bottles anyway if there are alternatives available. Maybe that’s the quiet part - making them less attractive to consumers
Wow. I got played. I did finally switch to just drinking tap water and the number of single use plastic bottles I go through each weak is down by 90% or smth. Just like 2-3 bottles of coke left. I buy some local off-brand stuff cause screw big corporations.
Nobody should be buying single use bottles anyway if there are alternatives available.
Are there alternatives available for carbonated beverages? I guess we could go back to glass bottles. But, they’re effectively single-use too.
We’ve come a long way, so that it’s normal to take a thermos to a coffee shop and have them put a tea or a coffee in it. I don’t know of any similar scheme for carbonated beverages. I’d love it if it existed, especially if you could keep your soda-pop cold for hours.
Glass bottles are not always single use. Countries have systems to recollect them (empty bottles hold a face value), they get factory-cleaned and quality tested and each bottle can run for 20 or more cycles. The issue is more that it increases the transportation and handling costs and emissions because of weight. Bottles that don’t pass the test anymore but did stay in the system can get near 100% recycled, tho the issues there are that it’s usually downgrade (make dark bright again = hard) and very energy intensive (costs more energy to recycle than to make glass from scratch). Anyhow: not single use.
But are they though? Personally i see many bottles littered and even more lids from cups. Actually why are straws replaced with paper but the lids are still plastic? And why not ban plastic bottles alltogether like they’ve done with so many other things?
Plastics legislation is often incredibly patchwork and politicised-feeling. It’s a good idea, but I kind of think Extended Producer Responsibility would have gotten the job done better.
I don’t know, it’s what they said. Maybe bottles are easier to clean up. They said “among” the most frequent items, so perhaps you’re right that those other things are worse, but there haven’t been reasonable alternatives suggested
it’s a change expected to prevent 10% of the litter in european beaches, to be fair, the true fix could be ban plastic lol
You are right. How do they still allow plastic bottles ? That’s a huge waste of ressources.
It actually is part of my point… i dont understand why they need to over complicate things
If i see this kind of shit, 90% of the time their domain would just go into my browsers’ blocklist. It’s likely either riddled with ads, or hosts incorrect/incompletely information too
I was certain this was parody before I went and read your text. wtf
807 partners sounds like the answer to what’s the point of ad blockers
Some third parties may have a legitimate interest.
Some.