About That Time Google Spied On My Gmail
I'm reading about how Microsoft read a blogger's Hotmail (or other Microsoft hosted email) to determine who leaked Microsoft information to that blogger. Microsoft's response is pathetic, stating that “the privacy of our customers is incredibly important to us” …
Context & Ripple Effects
The post lands one day after Microsoft admitted it scanned a blogger's Hotmail account to hunt the source of a Windows 8 leak, defending the move through its terms of service. Arrington turns that admission back around, alleging — without offering evidence beyond his own account — that Google once read his Gmail, which reframes a Microsoft scandal as an industry-wide question.
The irony is structural: Steve Ballmer spent 2007 arguing that Google reads your mail, and now Microsoft is the one caught reading user email while Google sits in the accused chair. The Guardian's pickup widens the frame by reporting that Yahoo, Google and Apple all claim contractual rights to read user email, and the backdrop is post-Snowden distrust — Microsoft has already lost customers including the government of Brazil, and hacked documents showed it charging the FBI hundreds of thousands monthly for legal access to customer data.
First-order effects
- Microsoft is pushed into immediate damage control, adding new safeguards to its investigation policy and asserting the Hotmail search met the standard required for a court order — an implicit concession that reading user mail absent such an order was indefensible.
- Google now faces a public, unverified accusation that it snooped on a prominent blogger's Gmail, forcing it to address the same behavior it has long criticized Microsoft for.
Second-order effects
- Every major webmail provider named in the syndicated coverage — Google, Yahoo, Apple — is pressured to spell out when its own terms permit reading user email, converting a single Microsoft leak investigation into a competitive liability across the category.
- Post-Snowden enterprise and government buyers, already defecting from US-hosted services, gain fresh evidence that provider self-investigation can substitute for legal process, sharpening the trust gap that cost Microsoft customers like Brazil.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer email terms of service stop functioning as a legal fig leaf: providers converge toward committing that internal access to user mail requires a court order, effectively industry-regulating what legislation had not yet forced.
The trend: In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, hosted email providers are being dragged from 'our terms allow it' toward court-order-only access to user communications, with each exposed incident raising the bar for the whole category.