If you send an email to a gmail user of course you are consenting for their email service to process the email. Things like spam filtering and preloading images depend on this.
Also, with Google's "Google Apps for Business", a user can use their own domain for their email. Sending someone an email doesn't inform the sender that they could be contributing to a Google profile.
There's nothing implied in sending an email beyond "I want you to read the contents". If there's more I want you to do, those wishes would be in the email itself.
30 years ago, if I wrote a paper letter to a company, I was not implying that I want them to build up a profile of me based on my stated info compared to the stated info of other people, where my letter came from, type of stationary, quality of my grammar, etc., then send me coupons that match the behavior they expect of people of my profile. I am implying that I want them to read my letter and take care of my request.
Meanwhile, no, you have no right to dictate how I contract out how I handle my mail by sending me a letter. You gave me that letter, and you'd have a difficult time making a case even if I then proceeded to make thousands of physical copies of it and distributed it at a street corner.
I guess what I'm saying is... what's your point?
edit:
You appear to be misreading your parent comment. The parallel situation they describe is precisely that the recipient engages a company to process their mail (read the description: "you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons [for] people who get the kind of mail that you do". All of that applies to receiving mail, not sending it.)
And this is precisely what's happening with Google: if you send mail to my gmail address, I've engaged Google to process it on my behalf. You have no say in the matter, nor can you.
Yeah, but it essentially always happened. You know those warranty cards you get with new products? They have always been used to build marketing databases.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/25/technology/do-you-really-n...
For example I use onion2k@myemailprovider.com to send emails to alice@gmail.com, bob@gmail.com and charlie@gmail.com. Google now have a profile for onion2k@myemailprovider.com with a graph that includes nodes for alice@, bob@ and charlie@ and edges for the relationships between the four people, and links to anything we've discussed. If david@gmail.com then sends an email to onion2k@myemailprovider.com Google know that david@ has a second order link to alice@, bob@ and charlie@ despite the fact that they have never communicated or informed Google of this relationship, because Google have a profile based on onion2k@myemailprovider.com - an address that Google might not have a justifiable reason to be building a profile on.
Whether or not you believe that is a reasonable use of data is up to you. Some people think it's not.
But does Google profiles it?
I'm not sure at all that it is clear what the nature of that link is. I have no insight into the gmail's email relationship modeling but I suspect that it doesn't automatically build a relationship between david@gmail.com and other people that onion2k contacted. For one thing, it would be impractical to do this across all possible relationships -- there would be polynomial growth of the adjacency matrix with no information gain to justify it. Ask yourself, what does it mean that david contacted onion2k and onion2k, at some point in time, contacted alice, bob, and charlie? Unless you already know something nontrivial about these people, you assume they are independent.
I guess my point is that data analysis can be very costly; it is reason that humans have a hard time dealing with meaningful relationships spanning more than about 150 people[1]. Even a company with Google's resources would be overwhelmed if it had to store and take into account a large number of mostly (I mean, vastly mostly) meaningless relationships. At the least, it takes away resources from the relationship graphs that do matter and which are actionable, such as the graphs of spammers.
Except that people who are on regular GMail will probably use e-mail forwarding provided by their domain registrar. Especially since the free Google Apps for domains is gone.
I can forward all of them to a virtual personal assistant in Mumbai and have them deal with it all, just sending me a daily summary and maybe writing some auto-responses for me, and there'd be no need for me to disclose that fact to every person that writes me an email.
You can do the same thing with physical mail as well...there are services that can receive your mail, scan it, and send me stuff that seems relevant. No need for people to be able to figure out that you're doing that.
The fact is that I can contract that sort of thing out however I like. It's my mail once I receive it. I think it should be required for students to be protected when they have to use an email system when attending a school, so go ahead and get a firm statement from google on that, but the main part of this class action, the people sending email to people with gmail addresses, are barking up the wrong tree.
This is all about moving from offline to online.
In the ancient days pre-email it was a non-trivial task to read every single letter being sent in a country, categorize them all and then profile people based on them.
And the countries that did that weren't somewhere you wanted to live.
In the modern age it's a "feature" that companies provide because "if you're not paying for it, you're the product".
Not that I think it's necessarily bad, but boundaries have to be set for this new age and this law suit is simply part of that process. Just look at it from a different perspective.
(And note that spam filters & image preloading are problems that only need to be solved because of the same new trivial cost of automated malicious actions)
It's more like if the person you are sending to hires an assistant to sort and organize their mail for them (which people actually do.) You then go and sue the assistant.
Many people sign NDA's. If you have an assistant read mails covered by the NDA, then the party who sent the mail can sue.
and so on and so on.
I'm not sure how common it is, and it's probably less so now with email, but I'd guess a lot of important people do have their assistants screen their confidential mail. For example, I know politicians often have people help with their mail.
A new cleaning company called CleanU create an app where people can easy order office cleaning by a single press of a button. In the ToS/service/liability contract on page 43, it says in legalize: "any document found by our assistants might be used to improve service and decrease costs".
This might sound as a great way to start a legit industry espionage service, but alas, it would be illegal under several laws. First, a judge would ask if there had been a merging of minds, and thus declare the contract void since no buyer could possible have agreed to such terms. Second, as a product (sale), one could ask if "theft" could reasonable be expected when one purchase cleaning. Since it can't, the contract can be made void in that way. Thirdly, if the intent is to hide an otherwise illegal activity under the assumption that people do not read EULA, that would qualify criminal charges under Mens rea, thus fraud.
In all, reading peoples mail because you managed to get people to click a box during registration is a deal on a very unstable legal ground. Law suits like this will explore exactly how unstable it is.
Cleaning services are also reasonably expected to clean desks. They might even temporary hold confidential documents in their hands while doing so. However, once they start reading the document and interpret them, a line has been crossed which no legal fine print can fix.
It's not that there's an assistant, it's that there's just one assistant reading everyone's mail, they can take all the tit bits to make a story and they've got a perfect memory.
This is one of the many differences between the new and old worlds, the sheer scope of the damage they could reap.