FWIW, I was warned by an independent director of my company a decade ago that there's no such thing as privacy in email or anything left online. His intended advice was that you never should post anything online about anybody you would not want them to see. The new meaning is that our online leavings for the past decade one day will be packaged up and sold. The only saving grace is that it's too easy to forge an online communication so the specifics will carry little weight. But access to porn and time spent on various sites? It'll all be out there to be purchased for pennies.

IMHO the MS vs Google privacy grievance is a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They both can or do scan mail. They both can and do have disgruntled employees or hack vectors. Asange was able to publish screeds of communication from what should have been one of the most sensitive and protected repositories in the world. It's only a matter of time before our leavings also are exposed no matter what MS or Google might do today. Meanwhile I'm not sure why some seem so determined to defend MS against the obvious.