I’ve had a Hotmail account for 15(?) years. Worked fine for many years.
7(?) years ago I got a smart phone & downloaded the Hotmail app; again worked fine for years.
Microsquash rebranded it to Outlook so I downloaded that app & it worked okay.
A couple of months ago they came out with a ‘new & improved’ app, which was promptly deleted once I realized all of the permissions it needed. They needed access to all of your contacts. Yeah, I realize it may be easier to send an email if you have all of my contacts, but since this is my personal email, separate from my professional one, by not importing contacts I can’t accidentally send an email to someone who shouldn’t get it because their email won’t pop up after I only type the first two letters.
I’m also still trying to figure out why my email app needs fine/GPS location access. I’ve used that app to send emails from multiple states/countries/continents; all of which went thru fine so no, you don’t need to know my exact location.
However, they must have recently slipped a change into the ToS that blow them off the charts of the creep-o-meter scale. I bought something on ebay. This morning I got two emails at the same minute, one from ebay - your purchase has shipped/here are the tracking details.
The other one was from Microsoft Outlook Calendar -
Outlook found this new event in your email and added it to your calendar:
Package delivery
Delivery estimate: 9/27/2016 - 9/28/2016
Package from EBay
So my question to you, Microsquash, is just when did I give you permission to read my emails & act upon them?
My second question is, while I know you have a calendar, I’ve never used it; how do I access if for this ‘most important’ (:rolleyes:) notice that some package will arrive at my doorstep sometime in a two-day window next month? Will it alarm when I’m in a meeting? How many times to I have to hit the <snooze> button to make it stop? I use google calendar just fine; but since that’s on a completely separate email account, which I’m not giving you access to, you’re not going to add this to the calendar that I really look at.
Can anyone recommend another email provider that doesn’t do this shit?
Outlook has long allowed users to send invitation messages that let recipients put an event into their Outlook calendars. I’d guess that the message you got from eBay was one of those. I’m not familiar with the latest version of Outlook (I only recently upgraded from Office 2003 to 2010), but it may have a setting that automatically puts such items into your calendar upon receipt. You may be able to switch it off.
As for reading your messages, Gmail has been doing that, and feeding you ads on the basis of their content, forever. I presume Microsoft and most other mail services do the same.
do you think this is any different from what happens on Android and iOS?
christ, the way some people talk about Microsoft, you’d think it was 1995 and Bill Gates was still monitoring everyone’s activities from his sunless warren beneath Fort Redmond.
Not ads, but if I have an airline flight scheduled for later today or a family member does (and I’ve received email in my Gmail account about it), a Google search on “flight status” will autocomplete with the airline name and flight number. I’ve seen something similar in Google Maps when I have an appointment that day; the system is ready to provide directions to the appointment.
The OP sees this as “creepy” but the service providers see it as anticipating your needs. I kind of like it.
When I was in LA earlier this summer, I noticed a notation on Google maps at John Wayne Airport: June 22, 5:35pm. It was my departure flight. I never told this to Google maps; I never added it to my calendar. Google just read my email.
I guess the moral of the story is, everyone’s creepy.
I don’t know if there is a way to switch it off, but the calendar is part of Outlook; no idea how to access it in Android though, as I only use it in my work computer, where there is an icon at the bottom left corner for “mail” (an envelope) and the next one which kind of looks like a wall calendar is indeed the calendar. Outlook also reads its own calendar and puts a line at the top of meeting invitations if there are conflicts, no need to flip back and forth. For business users it’s useful.
If this is hitting you hard as an example of off-the-charts creepiness, I think you’d better sit down before you find out anything else that’s happened in the last 15 years.
I seem to recall some ads recently for Microsoft Office 365, where one of their big selling points was that Outlook won’t read your email like Gmail does.
Actually, by now, they have a really, really good prediction capability, and combine that with the real-time monitoring to be able to identify bottlenecks and route you around them.
Since I started using Google Maps and/or Waze to navigate home and to work, I save roughly 8 minutes each morning and about 10 in the evenings compared to when my routes were based on my own estimations of traffic patterns, etc…
When you signed up for an e-mail account. In this day and age, it’s impossible to have a functional e-mail account without your provider doing this. You think that’s bad, wait until you learn that Microsoft also deletes most of your mail without even asking you about it.
Me too. I use Google, not MS, (mostly out of habit) but I like having my calendar connected to my email. I like my email program to have all my contacts. Everyone I’ve talked to since 2003 is in my contact list. What do I care? I don’t care if Google knows that I’ve just stopped off at Starbucks.
I do feel bad for the poor Google employee who spies on me, however. I mean, I thought my life was miserable, imagine having to be the poor bastard at Google who’s job it is to monitor everything on my phone.
On the most recent version of Android you can deny individual permissions. So, when you download a new app and it tells you that it needs your contacts, camera, microphone, access to your SMSs, Phone and Internet instead of just accepting it, you can decide that a flashlight really doesn’t need access to your text messages, contacts or your phone and turn those off. If it breaks the app, you move on (and in some cases the app won’t work or will refuse to install), otherwise, you’re good.
A few of months ago, I was exchanging some ideas with my boss (dean of a large scienfici department at the time) and she typed: “let’s discuss about this” in one of her replies. Outlook transformed it into an appointment invitation. I didn’t realize that Outlook had done this and I accepted the appointment.
Result: an appointment for a meeting with me got entered into my boss’ outlook calendar without her knowledge… I know plenty of places where this could have put me in trouble. Fortunately, this wasn’t one of those places.
The difference between Google and MS is that Google does things well…
That’s wrong. What should’ve happened is, Clippy should’ve popped up and said “Hi! Did you mean to say “let’s discuss this” or “let’s talk about this”?”