Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service

It&#x27;s crazy to think about the amount on insight outlook&#x27;s data collection must provide on the inner workings of so many companies across so many different industries, even their own competitors. There&#x27;s no way Microsoft isn&#x27;t at least <i>trying</i> to use that data for their own benefit, yet somehow the company is still such a mess.<p>Companies just blindly trust MS with their data and even force their employees to hand their personal data over in the process. I&#x27;ve pushed for my company to stop leaking so much company&#x2F;employee&#x2F;customer data to MS, but as long as the corporation doesn&#x27;t personally experience how that data is being used&#x2F;abused and they aren&#x27;t being fined or hauled into court over it I doubt much will change.

Im not disregarding that there are some dubious data uses here in the consumer version of the new outlook client. But I would be careful to not conflate this to all enterprise versions of the outlook client in office 365 paid plans.<p>Protonmail is using this to drive demand gen for their services. doesn&#x27;t make them wrong but understand the motivation and how they are pitching the narrative.

After 20+ years on Outlook, I recently switched to Thunderbird. Not quite as full featured and a little slow at times, but it’s finally a viable replacement for Outlook.

For those using Outlook only for email, thus not tied other services, I would strongly suggest taking a look at Claws Mail.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claws-mail.org&#x2F;index.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.claws-mail.org&#x2F;index.php</a><p>It&#x27;s lightning fast compared to Outlook, and very stable&#x2F;reliable. Also available on Windows.<p>Outlook .pst files (both mail and contacts) also can be easily ported to Mbox or other standard formats, then imported into Claws Mail, by using the readpst utility which is part of libpst utilities, available on various Linux distros. On Debian it&#x27;s part of pst-utils.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.five-ten-sg.com&#x2F;libpst&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.five-ten-sg.com&#x2F;libpst&#x2F;</a>

This post is pretty horrifying. If you&#x27;re in the Apple ecosystem, Apple Mail and iCloud Mail (standards-based, supports custom domains) has been as reliable as any mail provider and client I&#x27;ve ever used.

I do some tech support on the side. No one, and I mean no one wants to pay for email. So here we are.

So I now get advertised to by windows:<p>1) On the login screen (if you let it do its OOBE login background thing)<p>2) On the post login screen every time I update asking me to sign in to cloud (which is actually asking me to pay for cloud)<p>3) On the OS notifications on login prompting me to sign in to cloud<p>4) On the badge of my non-cloud user in the start menu with an orange blip that looks like a notification but is really a prompt to sign in and pay for cloud<p>5) At the top of my start menu begging me to pay for xbox live<p>6) Looking at email<p>7) Any app with AI features that&#x27;ll be horny to beg you to buy new AI credits. Like notepad.exe<p>Is there a reason I shouldn&#x27;t continue showing people how to steal their software or &#x2F;ideally&#x2F; invest in alternatives?

Here&#x27;s a tempting business model.<p>1&#x2F; Train AI models on corporate customer email<p>2&#x2F; Ask that AI questions about commercially interesting things<p>3&#x2F; Print money<p>In much the same way that models trained on GPL code write out code which is byte-for-byte identical to but otherwise completely distinct from the code it was trained on, said model will emit interesting emails that have only coincidental correspondence with the commercially sensitive information in the training data set.<p>Microsoft has absolutely everything they need to do this already in place. Obviously they&#x27;d never do something unethical like that so it&#x27;s safe to continue giving them all your corporate email.

This only applies to free accounts, i.e., accounts that have M365 Personal or Family don&#x27;t have the Advertising section

Microsoft realized all of their power users already moved to Linux years ago and they might as well fuck whatever sheep that are left even more royally over?

This doesn&#x27;t seem apply to a paid corporate Office 365 subscription. My work outlook doesn&#x27;t even have the Advertising Preferences item in settings.

Microsoft Teams on my phone yesterday pushed a Power BI ad into my work chat timeline.<p>I couldn&#x27;t find a way to turn off these ads.<p>Great way to destroy trust, Microsoft!

It’s g. d. everything. I haven’t installed a light switch for the light on our landing yet, so I need the Hue app and every day it slaps an ad in my face. Some days ago my wife came to me: Sonos is blocked by an ad I can’t close! I looked at the screen and there’s a super small cross at the top right. She’s also been complaining her “email changed”, indeed it’s outlook now, and damn it I pay for email not to have this s*t. Maybe I’ll get her to use Linux now (her laptop is perfectly fine but can’t do win11) or at least Thunderbird. Damn it, I pay for email, paid for Hue, paid for Sonos speakers, paid for that laptop. F off with those ads!<p>Enshitification galore!<p>(I&#x27;m a proud customer of Proton but only for my business, for the whole family I find the cost just a tad to high to justify so I have a small local provider)

German here. I think what we now see is what local nerds always warned about: US Big Tech is strategically making us dependent on them and when they play the end-game, we&#x27;re fu*ed.<p>Sure, they will disable the data collection and gladly obey the rules we put in the contracts (how do we know?). But they&#x27;ll make sure that we&#x27;re paying extra money for it. They&#x27;re sucking away our now even more valuable tax money[0] and our idiotic leadership of panic throws more money into this black hole.<p>[0] A &quot;Kleine Anfrage&quot; in the German parliament to the Bundesregierung in December 2023 made it public (but mostly ignored) that the German Bundesregierung will pay 6bn EUR to Microsoft and Oracle in the upcoming years. Source (in German): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdf.de&#x2F;nachrichten&#x2F;politik&#x2F;deutschland&#x2F;it-open-source-bundesregierung-kleine-anfrage-100.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdf.de&#x2F;nachrichten&#x2F;politik&#x2F;deutschland&#x2F;it-open-s...</a>

In some way, unrelated to the topic, I became too concerned to have a consent pop-up without the &quot;Reject All&quot; being clearly the default CTA. Having both buttons marked as &quot;primary&quot; makes it easy to trick the user to choose &quot;Accept&quot; by mistake.<p>Another place where I encounter this behavior is the pop-ups shown by web browsers for sites asking for special, sometimes weird [1], permission like &quot;location&quot; which took me about five seconds to make sure I pick the &quot;Block&quot; button.<p>I hope this sort of behavior gets regulated by the corresponding authorities.<p>1. I once hear a youtuber say: <i>Why on earth a wallpaper app needs to access my and manage my phone calls?!</i>

I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s all in my mind, but Microsoft&#x27;s targeted advertising in its apps&#x27; come across as extremely tacky. Everyone else is probably collecting the same data but it feels less slimey on the surface.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s &quot;new&quot; at all, but it is getting renewed focus, but also as it ties into the OS side of the house overall.<p>They want to basically make windows machines, telemetry kiosks for every bit of data they can extract.

That&#x27;s crazy that only because of GDPR they expose how nasty Microsoft is selling your data or allow an opt-out, and particularly NOT anyone else including the US. I do hope more mainstream media picks up on this.<p>This ought to be classified as adware itself now by malware detection. Obviously Windoze &quot;Defender&quot; won&#x27;t have a problem with this I&#x27;m sure, no conflict of interests there.

Has someone tried the Tiny11 [1] it seems there are security issues involved but would love to hear. Last time I tried to remove all the malware&#x2F;spyware (e.g. telemetry) it was time consuming.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Windows11&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1443318&#x2F;whats_up_with_tiny11_is_it_any_usable&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Windows11&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1443318&#x2F;whats_up...</a>

We spent years moving to forced encryption and multi-factor authentication for this? Microsoft could answer questions like:<p>Which of my employees is leaking info to a competitor? Looking for a new job?<p>I’m buying a property. What’s the level of interest from other buyers?<p>A client is applying for life insurance. Does he have any serious health issues?<p>Far-fetched or not, someone will be selling insights that would surprise you

People are hailing Linux, but there&#x27;s one big elephant in the room -- app sandboxing. While Microsoft surely tracks the Windows user, any software may be tracking the Linux user.<p>I&#x27;ve been on Linux for more than a decade, and even with advancements like Flatpak, Linux is very far from the protections Android, iOS, Mac and Windows have.

I&#x27;m wondering if someone can recommend a Windows email client for gmail and outlook. The official ones are so slow especially for Outlook that it dies for half a minute when opening up. I do have multiple accounts so that could be the reason, but there should never be 30 seconds of non-responding when opening up the app.

This is why I&#x27;m paying for my email service, and use Linux with thunderbird.

This post recall me the Gmail man ad from Microsoft.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eFCSp23xl40" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eFCSp23xl40</a>

This is only if you don&#x27;t have a paid account though. I have office 365 for business and I don&#x27;t get these popups.<p>Not that it justifies the behaviour of course but it&#x27;s not always the case.

Look just don&#x27;t use it anymore.

I wonder what the University of California, which is totally in on Office 365. I would hope that the University would take a strong position...but feel less than confident..surely a business account with M$ will mean something right?

&quot;New&quot; as if this has not been happening forever?

&gt; Although this transfer is secured with Transport Layer Security (TLS), according to Heise Online, your IMAP and SMTP username and password are transmitted to Microsoft in plain text<p>So like every login form in the world, which sends the username and password in plain text over SSL. This is pure FUD.

How does Proton mail make money?

“Microsoft changed” indeed.

&gt; ...it appears the company has transformed its email app into a surveillance tool for targeted advertising.<p>It&#x27;s not just Microsoft&#x27;s email, it&#x27;s all of Windows too. I tried Windows 11 for the first time not too long ago and it&#x27;s an abomination of an ad delivery vehicle that makes ChromeOS look magnificent.<p>After too many years of Windows, I finally bit the bullet and installed Linux on my desktop. Within a few weeks I was more productive than I was on Windows and my OS is no longer trying to sell me something constantly, and I should have done it sooner.

Somewhat related:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workspace.google.com&#x2F;intl&#x2F;en&#x2F;terms&#x2F;subprocessors&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workspace.google.com&#x2F;intl&#x2F;en&#x2F;terms&#x2F;subprocessors&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;subprocessors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;subprocessors</a>

Paying for Proton&#x27;s services is a no brainer to me. $11 a month for access to VPN, encrypted email, encrypted cloud storage and more.<p>Will gladly pay to not have my data shared with 772 3rd parties.

I&#x27;m am sick to death of being forced into being targeted by Ads.<p>I already run Pi-hole and use Brave, now I have to avoid Outlook.<p>Thanks microsoft. We don&#x27;t have enough attack vectors already, so it&#x27;s nice for you to compile all of our information to make it much easier for bad actors to gain our information. I&#x27;m sure the pittance fine levied against them, not if, but FUCKING WHEN, they get breached will teach them a lesson.<p>&#x2F;End -Rant

I am often confused by people who have loads of money, live in big houses, and drive nice cars who are not willing to pay a few bucks a month for a private email inbox and other services. I assume they are trapped or too lazy to buy a domain and make the necessary changes. What other reasons could they have?

I get absolutely positively outraged when a paid for product such as Operating System or MS Office starts bombarding me with ads.<p>I <i>get</i> that this was entirely predictable (see XKCD exhibit 1), and that once we allowed it in websites and webapps there were no real barriers left to downloaded installed native local apps, and my outrage is too little too late.<p>And I get that saying &quot;I&#x27;m now installing Linux on my laptop&quot; is... nice but irrelevant. 0.01% of userbase doing that will make laughably no dent.<p>But it&#x27;s really really getting too much. Grumble Grubmle everybody get off my lawn! :-&#x2F;<p>Relevant XKCD: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;743&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;743&#x2F;</a>

I really love Microsoft but I really also hate their data collection stuff because it comes at a cost of performance and user experience.