Google Says Scanning Text Of Your Emails To Sell Ads Is Perfectly Legal

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/09/google-says-scanning-text-of-your-emails-to-sell-ads-is-perfectly-legal.php

by OwGrk • 13 years ago

15 34 13 years ago

idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

Why is that even a question? Of course it's legal. It's in the terms of using their service in the first place. Nobody's forcing anybody to use Gmail, after all.

krig• 13 years ago

Maybe this is a difference between the US and Sweden, but at least around here, there are plenty of things that are illegal even if clearly stated in the terms of use and there is no compulsion involved. For example, it's illegal to sell yourself into slavery, even if you and your buyer both agree to it. A better example might be that it is illegal to sell ones vote in national elections.

(do not infer that _I_ think that scanning emails to show ads _should_ be illegal)

jmadsen• 13 years ago

no, it's no different in the US

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

We have the same sort of law, of course. It's illegal to sell yourself into slavery, illegal to sell human parts even if they're yours, illegal to grow and sell marijuana to your neighbor (um, well, that one's changing).

So clearly there are contractual acts that are illegal. This one isn't, and I find it odd that people would expect it to be, especially given that people don't otherwise seem to care about privacy at all - as long as somebody in arguable authority says it's for their safety from Bad Guys.

dingaling• 13 years ago

Nobody's forcing anybody to use Gmail, after all.

I think there are a couple of audiences who are; ( 1 ) employees of companies ( or students of institutions ) that have migrated to Gmail / GApps and ( 2 ) senders of e-mails who are unaware that one or more recipients are Gmail users.

For protecting the latter group, it is possible to configure most MTAs to hold or decline delivering to Gmail or any other arbitrary domain. For example, postfix has the 'smtpd_recipient_restrictions' directive.

joedevon• 13 years ago

What about Google Apps, which host domains that the user doesn't know belongs to google? Google can basically spy on anybody. Sort all emails to and from any email address and probably get a ton of stuff.

Then again, I suppose theoretically that's true of any large email provider. It just seems more egregious from Google since they are reading 3rd party emails to deliver ads...

IanCal6• 13 years ago

Google “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages”

I don't understand the concept of "opening up" an email. Comparing digital things to physical objects is always going to cause problems because they're not.

“all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”

Of course they must, in at least some sense. They've got to be processed by various programs to store them in the right place. We also expect them to be scanned and filtered for spam and viruses, which require them being processed.

The lawsuit notes that the company even scans messages sent to any of the 425 million active Gmail users from non-Gmail users who never agreed to the company’s terms.

1) Of course it must, for the reasons above.

2) If you send anything to someone else, they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. You're sending an email to someone that has promised to let another company scan it.

dangelov4• 13 years ago

"I don't understand the concept of "opening up" an email"

You can look at it same way as you look at "opening a file". Similarly, "read" and "acquire" can also be thought of in a digital way, rather than analog and it's perfectly comparable in this context in my opinion. It's also true, they do "open", "read" and "acquire" contents, even if done by automated, digital means (programs, algos). Now whether that is or should be unlawful, I don't know.

IanCal6• 13 years ago

But the servers have to process the emails in some sense, they've got to read the headers for a start. They also must touch and process the body of the email. You simply cannot process emails without "opening them up", such a comparison makes absolutely no sense.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

The devil is on the details, as usual. If Google scans them with the intention of selling ads then they probably keep a dossier of your preferences or the type of emails you receive/d based on keywords. On a more personal level they could know that you have AIDS, are pregnant, going through marital problems...

Also NSA, DEA, FBI, IRS, The ObamaCare Enforcement Squad the local Sherif and who knows what will love to have a historical view of your emails, even after your emails have been deleted and forgotten. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/09/dea-pays-t-a... . Do you trust what Google tells you about the process? If it's there it's ready to be accessed, leaked, stolen or taken with an administrative subpoena.

But yeah, if they tell you upfront and don't violate any laws, I guess it's OK. Of course people and competitors reserve the right to point it out and criticize it.

IanCal6• 13 years ago

The devil is on the details, as usual.

It is, which is why seeing such poor analogies ruins the debate. There is an interesting discussion to be had, but we're doomed to be stuck in a mire of examples with postcards being delivered by scrooglers.

Processing emails in some fashion simply has to happen. But after that it becomes a tradeoff.

I might be fine with having targeted adverts within gmail, but not on external sites. I might be fine with it anywhere, and consider my emails to be equivalent to loyalty cards.

On a more personal level they could know that you have AIDS, are pregnant, going through marital problems...

Of course they would, the data is all there. It has to be, it's in the data you're asking them to store on their servers! What they do with that information is the important thing.

If it's there it's ready to be accessed, leaked, stolen or taken with an administrative subpoena.

As it is anywhere.

anxiousest2• 13 years ago

What is it 2004?! of course it's legal, same as "scanning" mail content to identify spam or enable full text search. This lawsuit is ridiculous, it's either a money making scam or a PR stunt or both.

Revisor• 13 years ago

Maybe today is the right time to ask the question again.

anxiousest2• 13 years ago

It's a stupid question. They want webmail services (nay all cloud services) to cease automatically processing data they store. It's nonsense, that is what these services are all about, they want them to become useless, basically destroying their whole functionality and the economy related to them.

mjs• 13 years ago

You need to scan to detect spam, so scanning itself can't be a legal problem.

I don't see the issue here. The ads are not even slightly surreptitious, and they don't seem to be linked to your non-email ad profile. (They don't follow you across the web.)

(Would it be a problem if they were? Is there a fundamental legal issue here, is it it more of a transparency/disclosure problem?)

IanCal6• 13 years ago

Would it be a problem if they were?

This is something I feel could be. I don't expect my emails to be somehow secret to google, and having targeted ads within gmail is fine by me. However I don't like the idea of them popping up on external sites when visited with my browser, or a browser I've used. There they could be revealing information about me to external parties.

Mordor• 13 years ago

Google appear to be confusing the law with the loyalty of their customers.

Oletros5• 13 years ago

How so?

nohuck13• 13 years ago

Probably the plaintiffs believe in good faith that they are pushing for positive social change against a nefarious practice (and they certainly seem misguided, at best, to me). But

-It's a class-action suit. It's not unlikely the driving force behind organizing the class was the plaintiff's law firm looking for a long shot bet at a cut of a big payout, a reputation-making case, etc. I have no idea if this is the case. The incentives around this kind of thing are varied and not necessarily at all high-minded though.

-It bugs me when people start to think of the Googles of the world as a public utility. Assuming that you could make the world a better place by regulating their behaviour into something socially desirable is short-sighted. We have gmail because Google can monetize it with ads. Treating firms like Google as public utilities subject to public interest based regulation is not that different from treating banks as public utilities that are too big to fail (granted that's a complicated issue on its own)

“People believe, for better or worse, that their email is private correspondence, not subject to the eyes of a $180 billion corporation and its whims,” said Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court.

-I automatically get suspicious when would-be social reformers throw in the market cap of a company like this, as if to say, come on, they can afford to share the wealth. In a system where there's rule of law, it should be that that the practice is either legal or it isn't, right?

-It could well be that California has statutes on the books that clearly make this sort of thing illegal. If that's the case, we should fully support the plaintiff's winning, followed by brisk lobbying of legislators to correct the ridiculousness. Selective enforcement of bad laws is a horrible practice that opens the door to all kinds of arbitrariness and manipulation by the state. See rule of law.

andyhmltn• 13 years ago

Applying the same logic, would it be fine for me to sell someone a house, keep a key and then take pictures of their rooms every few days so I can advertise to them correctly?

Shish2k• 13 years ago

If the buyer signed a contract agreeing to it, sure

dangelov4• 13 years ago

Did you sell them a house, or let them live in it for free?

Oletros5• 13 years ago

Applying logic, it is a wrong analogy

rtpg• 13 years ago

I have a hard time imagining the problems with this. This is a case of the "Chinese Room": The scanning in the advertising isn't 'understanding' what you wrote, so its completely different from if a person was reading your e-mail.

I would like it if one day we could start to make that distinction.

Google Says Scanning Text Of Your Emails To Sell Ads Is Perfectly Legal

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