The aspects related to safety and to privacy they play an essential role when it comes to email and messaging services. Remember the unfortunate European law proposal that would have led to a mass surveillance of millions of citizens? After its collapse, the European Parliament banned any type of monitoring and the names of those who wanted to undermine end-to-end encryption popped up.
ProtonMailor rather the “parent company” Proton, is one of the companies that has most strongly opposed the bill known as Chat Control 2.0. Founded in 2014 by a group of researchers from CERN in Geneva, ProtonMail aims to offer a safer mail service and respectful of privacy compared to traditional solutions. In the past we have presented a comparison between ProtonMail and Tutanota.
ProntonMail comes down hard on Microsoft Outlook: it doesn’t respect users’ personal data
In a vitriolic post published on the company’s official blog, ProtonMail claims that Outlook it is no longer just a mail service but rather a tool used by Microsoft for data collection.
Edward Komenda (ProtonMail) highlights that anyone who downloads the new Outlook for Windows can immediately notice something that makes their antennas stand up. Microsoft claims, to date, to share user data of Outlook with 772 third parties. And it does so for various purposes, including: storing and/or accessing information on the user’s device, developing and improving products, personalizing ads and content, measuring the effectiveness of ads and content, obtaining detailed information on the audience, collecting precise geolocation data, identify users by scanning the device.
Osserva ProtonMail: “thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in force in the European Union, European users are at least informed that a large number of third parties will be able to view their data. US users, because of the government’s refusal to pass privacy legislation, they are never even informed of what is happening“. And keeps going: “to some extent, the new Outlook lets you choose how and whether to share data, but it’s not as simple as clicking a single switch“.
The collection of data, such as passwords, which should not be stored in the cloud, is also strongly contested
In its accusatory examination, ProtonMail also cites the result of a recent discovery: Outlook transfers email account passwords to Microsoft, without notifying users in any way. If they are configured third-party email accounts in the new Outlook (IMAP, SMTP, calendars, contacts,…), a lot of information – including the authentication details for these accounts – is collected on Microsoft servers. Certainly Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure collects passwords but storing also involves OAuth authorization tokens, for example. With the difference that, in this case, it is at least possible for users to cancel and subsequently withdraw.
ProtonMail goes on to report that “Microsoft grants itself the privilege of accessing the contents of email accounts at any time, scanning and analyzing the contents of emails, sharing the information with third parties“.
The professor Ulrich Kelber, German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, expressed concern about the behavior of the new Outlook. And he announced his intention to request a series of checks from the Irish Commissioner for data protection (Microsoft’s European branch has its registered office in Ireland).
Based on his policy, Microsoft does not use personal data from emails, chats or documents to deliver advertisements. But the ads that appear can still be selected using other data shared by the user, such as his interests and preferences, his location, the transactions carried out, the way in which Microsoft products are used, the search queries, the contents displayed.
The opening image is taken from the ProtonMail post.