Scroogled Are You?

Microsoft’s ammo is loaded with a new e-mail engine and it has openly challenged the opposition – Google through a new website – scroogled.com. This website is aimed at highlighting Google’s privacy invasion and winning over users onto their side.

It is an open secret that Gmail collects data from users, including the email subject and content – which is generally personal in nature. They use this data to identify the contextual ads to be displayed around your emails. The private data which is being fetched by Google is being challenged by Microsoft and the latter offers a solution through their state-of-the-art e-mail engine for free – Outlook.com.

In response, Google has stated that the data which is collected is used by their applications to load ads alone, and no human ever reads it. Yeah right! When push comes to shove, it ends up in the hands of bureau and other governmental agencies.

I have been told by an insider in Google on anonymity that businesses who have purchased Gmail e-mail engine are not spared from this invasion either. Although ads are not displayed around the business mail boxes, data gets collected anyway – which for any paid customer is not cool.

On the other hand, the Outlook.com e-mail engine is quite nice. It integrates nicely with SkyDrive and can be used via Outlook application through a Hotmail connector. I have been using Outlook.com for a few months, and it seems to be doing good. On the downside, the Outlook.com web engine is a little heavy on your memory and processor, and the spam filter is not as effective as Gmail’s. And, if Office 365 is offered free with Outlook account, I wouldn’t think twice before moving over to Outlook completely.