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Comment by inerte | Hacker News Reader

Everybody is quick to remember how gmail users accepted the terms and how the ads pay for the free service, but for me the most interesting part of the article is what happens for those that send emails to a gmail account?

This person never agreed to have its email scanned. Never agreed that its email address would become an index key on a profile to serve ads. Never agreed that its writing/attachments, commercial or not, would be part on how Google makes its money.

I've heard about people manipulating HTML forms to submit lower prices when shopping online. What happens if I send a poem that I wrote to a gmail account and append a Terms of Service to it, basically saying if Google scans this email with commercial intent they must pay me money? Is something like this even possible?

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Substitute for Google's silicon assistant a human personal assistant of the intended Gmail-using recipient. "If any person other than X reads this proprietary poetry, they owe inerte big bux!"

The mail recipient chose Google to handle his email. He could also have chosen some random human to assist him with handling his email. There is no difference.

If you wish to correspond with such a user, you must trust him not to show your email to parties you find obnoxious. If he betrays you in that regard, your beef, such as it is, is with him, not the parties he hired to handle his email.

As stated in the case, most users don't know what the assistant is doing. So by your analogy the assistant is reading the mail without permission and then secretly using what they learn to make money for themselves.

In such a case, we would certainly blame the assistant.

I personally think you do agree to it when you send an email to a @gmail.com address. It would be similar to agreeing to have your email permanently recorded when you send it to a @congress.gov account.

Can someone explain where this right to privacy in email came from? When did it become law that emails have to be protected the same way usps mail is? Or did people just start assuming that? If your email isn't encrypted then it's transmitted in plain text, one of my bosses once said "we're sending it through the public internet, that's like shouting it to on the street corner!"

Emailing someone seems extremely unlikely to be construed as accepting Google's terms - the average person wouldn't have a clue what Google does with emails, nor would they know if an email address is being forwarded to or collected by gmail, or gmail under a custom domain, nor have they been presented any terms, nor should they be expected to have sought out, read and understood the terms for the almost infinite number of services they don't use.

Not agreeing to their terms, but acknowledging that the domain of your email will handle your email using their policies, and that the privacy of the content of your email is limited to whatever privacy policies the recipient domain has in place.

Strongly disagree with "acknowledging" which is really the same thing - automatic, implicit acceptance of whatever happens next.

A domain and an email address don't imply anything by itself and it's impossible to know without significant research whose and what policies are in effect. You could arguably require one or more lawyers just to decipher what exactly you're subject to when you factor in different countries, company locations, server locations etc.

Phones and web/desktop mail clients have made email addresses virtually invisible in lieu of our contacts' names, and the factors I mentioned in my other post make it impossible to ultimately know what inbox an email really ends up in anyway.

Are we agreeing, or acknowledging, a telco's terms and conditions when we dial a number?

You could argue that if you send an email to a gmail user, it's no longer your email. You've lost all rights to it.

Like sending a postal letter, the paper is no longer yours. You've given it away to the recipient. Along with the rights to open it.

Email is not like a letter, it's like a postcard, where the contents are clearly visible to anyone who ever handles it (including all the relay servers). Theoretically speaking your expectation of privacy in a FB message is probably hire than in an email.

If you care about such, you need to encrypt the content of your email. Then it will be like a letter instead of a postcard.

Alexander the Geek will still get to add your metadata to his haystack, but, FWIW, the body of your email will remain in a long, long decryption work queue.

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