Microsoft has been making a lot of noise lately with its efforts to slam Google and its products such as the Rob Schneider Google Docs commercials to its various Scroogled ads. On Wednesday, Microsoft's Senior Director for its Bing division, Stefan Weitz, wrote a long blog post that once again brings up the company's concerns about Google not doing enough to protect the privacy of its users.
Weitz's post reflected on what Google revealed during its Google I/O developer conference last week, expressing his belief that the event showed the company's true colors of finding new ways to make money off the data of their users. He writes:
They will be paying more attention to your location, analyzing your photos and turning them into animated gifs and they’d like some credit for their innovations while rarely mentioning that all this personal data collection gives them more opportunities to show you ads.
Weitz also talks about how most people don't know how Google uses the information gathered from its customers, and even offers an infographic, shown below, to illustrate the differences between Bing and Google in that area. One of the differences is that IP addresses collected with Bing are deleted after six months, according to Microsoft, but Google keeps part of that IP information for 18 months.
Weitz says that when people are made aware of Google's privacy practices, they generally don't like it. For example, a study conducted by GFK Roper that was commissioned by Microsoft found that 70 percent of people were not aware that Gmail "reads" the emails of its users in order to help generate better targeted ads. The survey also indicated that nine out of 10 people wanted this "feature" of Gmail to be shut down.
At one point in the blog, Weitz uses an interesting metaphor to describe Google:
You know, for some folks – the bargain they strike with Google is fine. Just like personal space in an elevator, people have varying degrees of tolerance for how close another person gets to them, and varying degrees of comfort when that person is actually a corporation not wearing deodorant.
Wow. The senior director of Bing basically says that Google stinks. That's pretty hardcore.
Source: Bing blog | Image via Microsoft
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