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This seems like an interesting philosophical question -- after all, the sender never agreed to let Google read her emails, right? But I think the resolution is
by bo1024 13y ago
This seems like an interesting philosophical question -- after all, the sender never agreed to let Google read her emails, right? But I think the resolution is that the receiver did agree to let Google read both emails she sends and emails she receives. Once the receiver "receives" the email, Google has permission to read it regardless of how the sender feels about it (if the sender didn't want them read, she shouldn't have given them to a receiver who would agree to this).
But Google wasn't using that argument apparently; rather they were claiming that the sender gave "implicit" consent -- not sure if this seems obviously true to me....
- gibwell 13y agoThe judge has rejected the argument that the receiver has given permission in general even for their own messages to be intercepted.
- bo1024 13y agoHmm, seems like Google is being burned by their recent "unified" policy and wanting to put everything under a single banner --- their gmail TOS just seems to redirect to the general one. That has a section about "content you submit", but that doesn't seem to apply to email (you don't "submit" your email, do you? If it does apply to email, then it says Google has a license to publish and publicly distribute your email). The Privacy Policy has a section about "Information We Collect", but again email doesn't seem to be covered (nor docs for that matter). https://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/terms_of_use.html https://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/terms_of_use.html
- 001sky 13y ago> But I think the resolution is that the receiver did agree to let Google read both emails. “Google’s alleged interceptions are neither instrumental to the provision of email services, nor are they an incidental effect of providing these services. The Court therefore finds that Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the interceptions fall outside Google’s ordinary course of business...”
- cynwoody 13y agoIANAL, but wouldn't Google be acting as the recipient's chosen agent to help him communicate via email? E.g., what if the recipient has a paid human assistant who screens his email, wherever hosted. Further assume the sender knows nothing about said assistant, but would be mortified if she did? Google is the recipient's assistant and is compensated by being allowed to show the recipient ads based on an automated analysis of his email's content. How is an automated assistant materially different from a human one? I don't see the problem.
- gibwell 13y agoPart of the argument is that the assistant doesn't actually have the consent to use the contents of the email to show the recipient ads.