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I wonder if Gmail data is considered publicly available, given that Google has argued in court that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in inform
by clnq 3y ago
I wonder if Gmail data is considered publicly available, given that Google has argued in court that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.”
If so, how long before we can put something like “Jack Smith lives at:” or “Jane Smith has a health condition:” into Bard and it will democratize doxxing for us?
It’s very important to know where the creepy line Google doesn’t cross is these days. Is publicly available everything that the user communicates to someone else (shared files, photos, sent emails)? Is it what’s on the hypertext internet (in that case, the EULA is useless because you don’t sign Google’s EULA when you host websites unless you use Google Analytics)? Is all advertising data Google has on us considered public because it is already indirectly revealed to third parties through ad tools, or even all data Google has about us, period, because they said the expectation of privacy for that is unreasonable in court already.
There needs to be more clarity in these articles.
- bada-boom 3y agoI doubt that Gmail data is considered as publicly available. Access to it is probably restricted even to most Google employees. Or else we would have heard about such gaps, just like we heard of Amazon and Tesla employees access customer's audio/video data. Ads data is fundamentally different, as it's derivative from user data.
- Takennickname 3y agoThe absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
- pugio 3y agoTruisms aside, in many cases the absence of a thing which one would expect to see is in fact a support for alternate hypotheses. ie. "Given a world X is true, I would expect to see Y. Since I don't see Y, that's at least weak evidence that X may not be true." There are of course plenty of other reasons why you wouldn't see Y, but it's at least some kind of signal.
- weare138 3y agoBut it doesn't necessarily have to be considered 'public data' for Google to be able to exploit it. Google uses opt-in by default for privacy settings and has a long track record of being misleading when it comes to privacy. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who have unknowingly opted in to 'volunteering' their Gmail data or will soon be.
- joker_minmax 3y agoOn the other two threads, many people considered Gmail to be "public" because it wasn't end-to-end encrypted.