Gmail scanning may violate federal wiretapping laws, judge finds
pcworld.com
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But Google wasn't using that argument apparently; rather they were claiming that the sender gave "implicit" consent -- not sure if this seems obviously true to me....
E.g., what if the recipient has a paid human assistant who screens his email, wherever hosted. Further assume the sender knows nothing about said assistant, but would be mortified if she did?
Google is the recipient's assistant and is compensated by being allowed to show the recipient ads based on an automated analysis of his email's content. How is an automated assistant materially different from a human one?
I don't see the problem.
“Google’s alleged interceptions are neither instrumental to the provision of email services, nor are they an incidental effect of providing these services. The Court therefore finds that Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the interceptions fall outside Google’s ordinary course of business...”
Google is just using it for ads, but the government can construct whatever paranoid stuff from my mails.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/governments-attack-clo...
"And now the government is trying to use standard contractual language to argue that any user of a cloud computing service has, at best, "severely limited" ownership rights in their property."
Both are bad. That said, I think the threat of civil liberties being taken away by companies like Facebook and Google is very understated and very underestimated.
And if I can give you a piece of my mind for a moment here, I am actually fine with someone sticking a hand in my rectum in isolated instances. I think I would actually be more bothered when Facebook decides to sell my private info to credit card companies and insurance companies and I end up paying more for insurance or whatever because of this.
Because betterunix was disagreeing with rayiner, who made the original comparison.
Google also can compile information about the sender or receiver of an email even if they are not on gmail. Can they retarget ads based on that information?
Do this experiment: make a sock Facebook account, communicate dozens of messages with keywords like "fat", "weight", "exercise", "weight loss", include similar keywords in your likes. Then sit back and watch... you'll be targeted with weight loss pills and all that.
But here's the kicker though... the weight loss pills they are advertising are almost always bad. They're scam businesses. The pills they're selling will almost certainly adversely affect your health. But they're going to penetrate the psyche of a person who's having weight issues, they know how to advertise their pills to them. People are going to buy those pills.
And yes, when the floodgates that are guarding medical information open up, it's going to be a mess. And it's going to have deleterious effects on our society.
One of our stupid government filters may think either me or my girlfriend is a terrorist because I wrote "bomb" and place me on a no-fly list. Has happened...
Look up Tuskehee siphylus or J Edgar Hoover or American Indian.
What do you think "radical" means? The word was invented to describe "people who aren't doing anything wrong (else they would be criminals or terrorists) but who the people government don't like .
So, the third party has no chance to be aware of Google's ToS...
When I send an email to a company that uses third-party customer support software to consume, parse, and host the email; I don't agree to the TOS of the customer support vendor.
When I send an email to a company that uses third-party software to parse and archive email for legal purposes; I don't agree to the TOS of that email parsing and archiving company.
It would be ridiculous and impossible to expect that I would agree to the TOS of each and all pieces of software used in the processing of my communications with a company.
And? The intent is irrelevant
Can you post a link to those laws
This issue is about what the receiver wants to do with the email, so by using gmail, or forwarding to gmail, the receiver is opting to have all his or her mails scanned by Google for ad placement.
However, if I do not know that the recipient uses Google Mail, it is not okay that Google scans and potentially indexes my wiener...
Did you find a picture of your wiener on Google Images? What search terms did you use? Or did you take a quick snap and drop it on the camera icon in the Google Image Search box?
I've not done the wiener experiment, but I do know that Google's ad placement algorithms are fairly simple-minded. For instance, our CFO sent me a request for a dump of some accounts off the accounting server. What ads did I see? Dumpster rentals and local trash haulers!
Koh also rejected Google's contention that non-Gmail users gave their implied consent to scanning of their communications.
"Google has cited no case that stands for the proposition that users who send emails impliedly consent to interceptions and use of their communications by third parties other than the intended recipient of the email," Koh wrote.
If, for you, such parties include Google's servers, then don't send mail to Gmail users. And make sure your non-Gmail correspondents do likewise.
Intent is irrelevant, if one is wiretapping then the other is also wiretapping
Mostly by offering value to their customers in the form of added services.
Google do it to allow themselves to provide a free email service.
Without the scanning of email done by google, everyone would have to pay for their email services.
You may or may not like the trade off, but apparently MANY people would prefer to have a free email service that provides advertising over a paid for email service that does not.
On reflection I think that would be a good thing.
At present > 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Thousands of staff are involved in designing and implementing 'improved' advertising systems. Millions of hours are consumed by this every year.
If Google was forced to transition to a subscription service for Gmail it might force a general shift in their revenue model. I contend all that brain power could be redeployed to doing amazing things, rather than refining AdWords .
If we say analyzing your communication is ok as long as it makes money for the service provider and the service is free, we open a Pandora's box. Google (and anyone operating an SMTP server) would be able to sell HR reports to recruiters, insurability scores to insurers, predictions of criminality to police departments, infidelity scores to private detectives, etc. Advertising is not a specially protected business model.
Why one of these things constitutes an "intercept" and not the others don't is ridiculous- whether the action is in the "normal order of business". The definition of intercept as the "acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic, or oral communication" simply can't apply to just one of these things.
By the Plaintiffs' arguments, any system on the internet that forwards an SMTP packet is an unlawful intercept, because it has to acquire the contents to copy them from one channel to another.
All of the decisions on this seem to be based on the scenario where an intercept involves a person listening to a phone call. I would submit, that if it is just code reading the email that was intentionally sent to the system the code is running on, it is not really being intercepted.
Using the contents of people's email to support an arbitrary business model is too broad according to the judge.
If we allow advertising as a legitimate reason to allow machines to read your email, why not also allow Google to offer credit scores, insurance ratings, HR evaluations, and services to private detectives?
Whether or not Google should be allowed to perform additional processing of the emails in order to choose appropriate advertising is a separate issue. I'm concerned that a lot of articles are missing this critical distinction. The focus of the debate needs to be whether they can deliver advertising which is based wholly or partially on the content of your emails; they fundamentally have to (electronically) read your emails in order to deliver them to recipients.
There is software and hardware involved in encoding/decoding the analogue signal, and compressing it for transmission across a digital network. That involves automated processing, without which the system can't function.
I'm very much opposed to surveillance and other forms of privacy invasion, but I think the discussion needs to be based on a clear understanding of the nature of the processing involved, and the debate to be around which forms of automatic processing fall into the "acceptable" and "unacceptable" category.
Examples of the latter, in my view, would include storing a copy of your content for longer than necessary to transmit the call, doing speech-to-text analysis and using the extracted words to build up a profile on the caller/callee, and making the recorded information available to government agencies for surveillance purposes or corporate entities for advertising purposes.
"Listening in" is an insufficiently-defined term, which doesn't provide enough information for us to have a proper debate about exactly what's going on.
Let's get the NSA before this judge next.
Somehow I don't think we'd say that they haven't intercepted the email.
And, like any Gmail user, you did agree to their TOS? Well? Didn't you?
Also, the judge has already decided that even Gmail users are generally unlikely to understand that their emails are being intercepted for Google's business purposes.