At last, Microsoft is doing something right.

Microsoft is doing a lot right. They've been instrumental in driving one of the most prolific spammers on the net into bankruptcy already, as well as seriously harming several others.

They're also deeply involved in the fight against virus authors.

Microsoft in 2003 (I think it was) designed and built for free a large scale system to aid in the fight against child porn and child abuse for the Canadian federal police. This system does automatic facial recognition between child porn pictures and videos and the missing person database to identify missing children being forced into the porn industry. This greatly eases the very bad task of police officers who until then had to watch every second of every one of those disgusting tapes and pictures and do manual matches (which led to a lot of emotional and mental problems as you can imagine)...

Microsoft has donated thousands of PCs to schools in poor districts in the US and around the world, schools that otherwise could never have taught their pupils to use computers...

I'm one to give credit where credit is due. I really applaud Microsoft in this effort-- phishing is a serious issue, especially considering how the methods phishers use to get the information is really legit looking, even the images load up from the originating bank's site. It's almost understandable how people can fall for this stuff, given the sophistication of their tactics.

It's probably a tax loophole.

So this is what they did with That Information

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/09/463204.aspx
What information is sent to Microsoft for checking a website

Phishing Filter does not check every URL on the Microsoft server. It only sends those which are not on a known list of OK sites or those that appear suspicious based on heuristics. If an URL is checked on the Microsoft server, first the URL is stripped down to the path to help remove personal information, then the remaining URL is sent over a secure SSL connection. The communication with the Microsoft server is done asynchronously so that there is little to no effect on your browsing experience.