[plug] Microsoft?

[Simon Wise]

> On 13/06/14 13:36, Onno Benschop wrote:

>> I'm not aware of being on any Microsoft Database, they claimed that they
>> got my details from my website, but couldn't tell me where they got my
>> company name from in the first place. They supplied my domain, email and
>> phone number and appeared to know my name.
>>
>> The email headers are extensive, but I'm using Google Mail, so I don't

Google is a media company, it sells access to its users. Google Mail is just a 
commercial service provided in exchange for the access it gives to you, to be 
on-sold to advertisers or used internally in providing its services. You can 
safely assume that these corporation comply with almost all requests from police 
and surveillance organisations as well, including requests that they keep such 
compliance discrete (they wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of legislators, 
they depend very heavily on favourable treatment).

Just like commercial TV stations offer a broadcast in exchange for being able to 
sell access to their viewers' living room screens (and their attention) to 
anyone with a big enough budget wishing to promote something ... Google, 
Facebook and such offer services such as searches, webmail and social sharing 
sites in exchange for access to the data you put there and then sell targeted 
access to you based on this data.

Most obviously via all the viewer-targeted advertising space they have. Ads on 
many websites and in many tablet or phone apps are very often from Google, 
selected to target you based on the data you have given them ... in your case 
this includes all your email. These services, in turn, are provided to you in 
exchange for access to your attention to Google's advertising space and a share 
  of the revenue. They don't just sell access to you via their own network of 
display advertising space and search results etc, but also by selling services 
which enable others to conduct targeted advertising, presumably Microsoft is 
their client in your case, perhaps buying a certain number of names and contacts 
who are potentially interested in what they are promoting.

You could try to avoid all this commercial activity if you want, but you would 
need to abstain from a huge part of our society ... we are very committed to 
this way of funding much of our public activity, we even seem very proud of our 
free-market status, working towards killing off alternatives such as direct 
public funding and peer-to-peer networking for some time now. Like yourself, we 
generally avoid paying subscriptions for services directly, and very much prefer 
these commercial $0 services when they are offered.


Simon