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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

In light of the whole NSA thing, it's difficult to see where this registers on the scale of importance/relevance. Let's say Google is guilty of scanning email text for ads. What does that mean? Judge then orders G to stop, and they do. G pays a big fine(which is nothing to them). Will people feel safer about their Gmail afterwards? I guess filters will be out of the question unless you opt-in for Google to scan your email, which I suspect most users will. Some big ol' wall of text EULA/ToS next time you login, you'll have to accept... or at first you'll deny and your emails will be a mess... then you go back and accept.

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"Let's say Google is guilty of scanning email text for ads."

that's not the question here. google scans the text of email so they can deliver relevant ads. they freely admit to that, have never tried to hide it, and have been doing it for 10 years with little to no public concern about it. The only question to be decided here is whether scanning your emails for the purposes of advertising counts as wiretapping.

Not just "scanning emails for the purposes of advertising", but scanning the emails of people who are not Google customers and have never agreed to Google terms. That is the only point in contention.

What I got from reading the excerpt of Judge Koh's response in the article was that she was maintaining a vertical separation between the business / activities of sending and receiving mail and other business activities. From my following, I'd imagine that filters and priority inbox and other details would be related to the business of sending and receiving mail.

If Google can win the argument that the way they're using their interception and reading of messages in serving personalized ads is a part of their everyday business activities, it seems to completely undermine the purpose of the law. Google, with G+, is trying to itself be a single unified product with all of these features. Social networking is a feature, videos are a feature, websites, blogs, instant messaging and email and targeted advertising. If Google can say that displaying targeted ads is a part of their normal business activities, then what activity does the law against wiretapping actually protect against?

If Google can read your email for the purpose of enabling a tangential feature of displaying targeted advertising to you, how does that same logic not apply to me if I claim my normal business activities are delivering your mail while opening it, reading it, and selling useful information I find inside of it? I could say it was essential to my business, because I actually deliver for free and just pay my bills with the info I sell.

It's definitely an interesting case. It seems clear that scanning email solely for the purpose of providing advertisements against it would be illegal (let's ignore the discussion of whether or not this is a stupid law). It also seems clear that scanning emails for spam and categorization is legal. So given that google has a legal reason for scanning the content of emails, is there anything prohibiting them from using the data from that scan for their other business activities? It sounds to me that once you have the reason to get the data, how you actually use it is just up to the product's TOS.

and regarding your last paragraph, you have to remember that this is all consented to by the user. it's not akin to somebody reading and selling your mail before they deliver it to you, it's akin to somebody doing that because you hired them to.

There's lots of liability you can't skirt by saying it's implied that the other person consented. It seems like saying someone consented to waving the accessibility rights afforded under the ADA because it was a condition of patronizing the store.

And I don't follow why you think once you have a reason to use data for one purpose, you automatically have the right to use it for any purpose.

It's highly relevant. If we say Google can scan your email just to support an arbitrary business model, how can we make an argument that the NSA should be prevented from doing it in the name of national security.

It isn't a good thing for Google to try to make loss of privacy seem like business as usual.

I don't like that Google would build a profile on me by scanning the contents of my emails, but it's an agreement I knowingly enter into when I occasionally use Gmail.

But what about a non-Gmail-using party who sends emails to one or more Gmail users? Is Google building a dossier on them based on their return address? Are they associating that person's email with other tracking mechanisms Google employs?

I don't know if Google does these things, but if they did, would it be OK?

If some or all of the collected raw data is at most a 'probably foreign' request away for military spies, is it OK to scan and store every bit of data that would be permissible in a mutual-trust-based civil society?

That's easy.

You signed up for Gmail knowing how your email service is being paid for.

As for National Security, well, the hell with it! No role for a nation or security unless I get to define the parameters of my privacy!

Snowden 2020! (When he'll be over 35 ;)).

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