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Information Technology News Windows Live Mail client matches ads to your content
Information Technology News Windows Live Mail client matches ads to your content | Windows Live Mail client matches ads to your content |
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| Written by Stan Beer | |
| Tuesday, 06 June 2006 | |
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Microsoft's new email client Windows Live Mail Desktop will serve up ads to you alongside the messages you receive in your email inbox based on the context of the text-based content in your messages. Hang on, you may protest. Isn't that an invasion of my privacy? After all, aren't email communications supposed to be private in the same way as snail mail letters are private? Not according to Microsoft. In fact, if you believe the blurb written in the software company's MSN Spaces blog, they're doing you a favour and actually adding value to your emails. According to Microsoft, much of what you need to get done online – from planning your next vacation to remembering to buy flowers for your mom on her birthday – is piling up in your inbox, just waiting for you to take action, usually by looking something up on the web. So in its benevolence Microsoft, Microsoft picks the eyes out any message you receive and presents them to you as key search term links with a search box directly underneath. And on the right hand side of the page there are sponsored links. All this sounds very familiar of course. It's similar to your standard Google search engine page. Except it's inside an email client, using your private content upon which to serve you search terms and context based ads. In an effort to head off any privacy concerns, Microsoft insists that the search terms, sponsored links and search results shown in its Active Search will be generated by computers not humans. What's more, Microsoft promises that none of the keywords it collects or advertising services will be traced back to the email they were drawn from and email content will not be shared with third parties without permission. Finally, to underline that what Microsoft intends to serve up is a safe system, the system never looks at attachments, never looks at credit card numbers and never looks at junk mail. That sounds like one heck of a smart system alright. For some people that might be just a little too smart, which is why many may well opt for Microsoft's ultimate failsafe option and turn Active Search off. {moscomment}
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