New Outlook Decried as a “Surveillance Tool for Targeted Advertising”

Thanks to new EU privacy regulations, the new Outlook displays a disturbing disclosure there that users elsewhere never see: Microsoft is using the app to harvest personal data and selling it advertisers that use it to display targeted ads both inside and outside the app.

“It looks like Outlook is no longer simply an email service,” Proton’s Edward Komenda writes in a new post to the privacy focused company’s blog. “It’s a data collection mechanism for Microsoft’s 772 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself.”

This disclosure explains that Microsoft and 772 of its partners are scanning the PC on which the new Outlook runs specifically to identify the user, storing and/or accessing information on that PC, delivering personalized ads and other content, and otherwise deriving “audience insights.” A separate “Choose your ads layout” window, also shown only in the EU, explains that Outlook will display dismissible ads in your mailbox by default, but that you can move the ads into a banner above the mailbox instead. Some ads from Microsoft and its partners literally appear as if they were new emails, confusing users.

“Thanks to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, Europeans are at least informed that a small village of third parties will be able to look at their data,” Komenda explains. “UK users can explore a ‘List of Advertising Partners,’ which shows the disturbing number of ad companies working with Microsoft. Americans, thanks to their government’s refusal to pass privacy legislation, are never even informed this is happening.”

To be clear, Microsoft does not use personal data in email to target ads. But Microsoft’s privacy statement explains why it doesn’t need to do that to build a profile of you, as it targets ads based on “your interests and favorites, your location, your transactions, how you use our products, your search queries, or the content you view.” It then sells that data to advertisers and other online entities, including service providers.

Microsoft’s expanded push into advertising was no doubt triggered by Google’s successes in this market, and the firm announced in 2021 that it wanted to double the size of that business to $20 billion. But Microsoft is now “addicted” to these revenues, Komenda charges, which is why it has expanded its customers exposure to advertising.

Yes, Proton sells privacy—I wrote about the release of its native email client recently—and so you may view these charges as self-serving. That’s fine, but be sure to read the Proton blog post in full, including the many links it has to other examples. I’ve made this point about Microsoft Edge, in particular, but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft today is, in Komenda’s words, no different than the Googles and Metas of the world. And that is a problem.