So who's "Scroogled" now? Worse than China...

Summary: Microsoft manages to be even more user-hostile than the Chinese counterparts and Microsoft staff is abusing access to people's data

Microsoft has a so-called 'decision engine' it calls Bing, which was widely accused (with evidence) of censoring GNU/Linux and FOSS when it was first announced (the brand, not the service). Microsoft does not claim to be delivering results based on objective analysis; Microsoft is making editorial decisions, which is a recipe for trouble. Microsoft also scrapes Google search results, censors.blocks links, and does other very unethical -- if not illegal -- things. But a tyrant would like that. Since whatever people search for is passed to Microsoft's friends at the NSA, it should be so shocking that all this stuff is allowed to happen, sometimes even encouraged.

Now, according to new reports, Microsoft's decisions in China are more strict and severe than China's. To quote one article: "Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Bing search engine is under attack, once again, over the Chinese censorship issue. Chinese web monitoring firm GreatFire has raised objections over the way Bing shows search results in China. GreatFire found that Microsoft’s search engine censors heavily in the world’s most populous country, even more than Chinese company Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU)."

What are the chances that Microsoft also relays search phrases to the Chinese government, not just the NSA? Almost a decade ago Microsoft came under fire for profiling users of its services in China. This has real potential for huge abuse.

Citing this other new article ("Ex-Microsoft employee charged with passing blogger trade secrets") we now know that data protection at Microsoft is a total joke. The reader who sent it to us quotes this part: "The code was later confirmed to be authentic, prompting corporate investigators to dredge the Hotmail account the blogger used to contact the Microsoft worker."

"This is big," explains the reader, because Microsoft "can and does read Hotmail / Live accounts for whatever reasons. Only fools run an account with them."

In section 3.5 of the waiver from Microsoft it says that "Microsoft reserves the right to review content".

So here we have yet more reasons to never ever host anything on Microsoft's platforms, or even use its services which are spying on users, deceiving users, and informing on the users, as we have learned from Snowden's leaks.

Microsoft is in no position to chastise Google. ⬆