[ufmace]

They're now owned by Microsoft. Critical difference between Microsoft and Google - Microsoft makes all of their money from direct sales and enterprise contracts for their primary products, including Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, ActiveDirectory, Office, etc, while Google makes their money from selling ads to you with as much targeting information as possible. So this is now a loss leader for Microsoft, primarily to draw your attention to their primary products, and any money it makes or loses is on too small of a scale for Microsoft to care probably.

There's plenty you can criticize Microsoft about for sure, but they aren't trying to gather boatloads of info about you, just keep you buying Microsoft software.

Now that I think about it like that, maybe Google is infact becoming more evil than Microsoft.

[kyrra]

(disclaimer, I work for Google, opinions are my own)

Depends on the product you are using and what kind of data you're talking about. For Google, GSuite (the old Google Apps and GCP) are more business focused and don't really capture data about you. Free-tier products will gather more data to better target ads to you or to provide useful features.

For Microsoft, they do try to sell you products... but you have to look at other products where they do gather data on you. I'm not sure what kind of data they get out of Bing and outlook.com/Hotmail. Then you have LinkedIn, which is all kinds of data gathering (though more Facebook style).

It's sort of hard to give blanket statements about many of the large tech companies, as they have multiple divisions and products that operate differently depending on the target markets.

[szggzs27]

Agreed but I hesitate conclude that Microsoft wouldn't care about making some extra buck by placing ads. The amount of crap I've seen with windows 8 and 10 was disgusting