No. The benefits to Microsoft from taking my business emails are negligible compared to their revenues. That’s not the case for an individual with malicious intent.
Malicious to me is intent. Microsoft does not store my emails to snoop or to potentially steal my assets. It Is a side effect of the systems they have created to ease user friction.
Some might argue that they want my data or behaviour (which is snooping) but exactly what has been said, my subscription fee is the value they extract from me and their enterprise value is the stickiness and the experience they provide.
To be clear, I am not a Microsoft fan, but I think it is safe to assume that Microsoft would not scrape my crypto wallets or bank account information to steal the entirety of my liquid assets. I can’t say the same for actors that plunk in a rogue email address to BCC themselves.
I have no idea how far the crew at Microsoft or any other large tech giant is willing to go into the grey area, but I can tell you they won’t attempt to drain my bank account without providing SOME kind of value to me in return.
You choosing not to care about Microsoft's extensive and well-documented history of adversarially abusing, misleading, lying to, spying on, harassing, and stripping control away from their own end users doesn't mean Microsoft isn't malicious.
Microsoft sees and treats their end users simultaneously as adversaries, as incompetent children, and as data cows to be milked without genuine informed consent for Microsoft's own profit, not as customers deserving of respect, dignity, and autonomy.
As I mentioned above. I do not like Microsoft, but there is a difference of intention. In your over-characterization, you forget the fact that they provide product/services to users. Regardless of their strategies and how they build their bottom line, they provide users something in exchange for money. Regardless if the thing they provide has far reaching consequences or happens to be built for better fingerprinting, it’s been long enough of this that informed users know the trade offs.
I am so shocked at the amount of people that think someone who wants to siphon your livelihood in a parasitic fashion is equivalent to a corporation that you have to conceivably opt into using. Users can make choices in the products they use. This person injected themselves as a man in the middle in user’s lives. Completely different circumstances and not at all the same intention.
