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Google Accused of Wiretapping in Gmail Scans
- natrius 13y agoGoogle makes a good point: if it's illegal to scan emails to serve ads, doesn't that mean it's also illegal to scan emails to filter spam and prioritize email?
- barista 13y agoscanning for spam does not have to extract the context. Scanning for serving ads probably does?
- vkou 13y agoScanning to apply a filter (Machine-taught, or user-defined) definitely does.
- unreal37 13y agoModern email spam detectors definitely read the contents of the email and even try to extract context through certain words appearing together.
- cynwoody 13y agoWhat does it mean to extract the content? To filter spam, you need to make enough sense of the email to identify it as spammy, according to some algorithm. To serve an ad, you need to make enough sense of the email to indicate it's about something one or more of your advertisers cares about. I can't think of a way to distinguish between the spam robot's access vs the ad robot's.
- greenyoda 13y agoThere's a difference: filtering spam and prioritizing mail is something that's done for the benefit of the user. However, scanning e-mails to maximize ad revenue (they can charge the advertisers more for "relevant" ads) is Google using the contents of your e-mail for their own benefit.
- natrius 13y agoMy hunch is that there's no law that makes such a distinction.
- gibwell 13y agoThen you didn't read the judge's opinion. The wiretapping statue apparently does make such a distinction.
- Oletros 13y agoJudge Koh actually didn't made the distinction, user profiles are also used for spam filtering and she talked about scanning for making user profiles OR targeting ads
- Flenser 13y agoRevenue which pays for the FREE service. If the choice was gmail with ads or no gmail I know which I'd choose.
- dingaling 13y ago> Revenue which pays for the FREE service Google also scans e-mails in paid Google Apps accounts. Edit: correction to myself. Whilst paid Google Apps accounts still show ads and Web Clips, Google now have this statement: If you are using Google Apps (free edition), email is scanned so we can display contextually relevant advertising in some circumstances. http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60762 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60762 the implication being that the paid accounts are scanned only for virus, spam and Priority Inbox processing. Sorry, I was wrong.
- georganos 13y agoWould making money to pay for the services the users use count as being towards the benefit of the user?
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- gibwell 13y agoOne is to provide a feature for the end user's benefit. The other is taking the user's private communication and using it to make money for Google. If this business model is allowed, imagine all the other kinds of profile that communications providers would be able to sell about you based on the contents of your email.
- DannyBee 13y ago"One is to provide a feature for the end user. The other is taking the user's private communication and using it to make money for Google." Assume this is true for a second. I'm not aware of any legal caselaw that has ever drawn such a distinction for the acts in play here. So I guess i don't get while people keep saying this like it should or would matter. (I can't really opine on the case itself for obvious reasons)
- Amadou 13y agoI'm not aware of any legal caselaw that has ever drawn such a distinction for the acts in play here. So I guess i don't get while people keep saying this like it should or would matter. Law is always a distant second to morality. Sometimes it catches up, sometimes it doesn't. But to define what is right by a lack of previously established law is astoundingly naive, bordering on self-serving. Even when there is precedent, it doesn't necessarily define the morality of a situation, e.g. slavery, driving under the influence and women's suffrage among many thousands of examples.
- gibwell 13y agoAccording to the judge the wiretapping statutes allow only interception that is 'instrumental' to providing the service to the end user, and she specifically stated the opinion that the exception is not intended to be broad enough to permit any arbitrary business model. That's why people keep mentioning it.
- DannyBee 13y agoAh, thanks. Well then, she'll likely be overturned, unless her circuit feels like making another split. Most other circuits (except two I believe) have explicitly held it to be okay for things like behavioral advertising. See, for example, Kirch v. Embarq Management Co (10th circuit) Given ECPA does not define "ordinary course of business" in any way, and the accompanying senate reports do not say anything about the exception being related to "for the benefit of the end user" (and instead talks entirely about the need/desires of the ISPS using the communications) , I would guess the opinion will have some trouble at the appellate level, but i guess we'll see!
- 001sky 13y ago“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...” From the e-mail case, but this logic would generate the relevant distinction. Their initial legal positioning seems open to question, but only time will tell.
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- smtddr 13y agoIn light of the whole NSA thing, it's difficult to see where this registers on the scale of importance/relevance. Let's say Google is guilty of scanning email text for ads. What does that mean? Judge then orders G to stop, and they do. G pays a big fine(which is nothing to them). Will people feel safer about their Gmail afterwards? I guess filters will be out of the question unless you opt-in for Google to scan your email, which I suspect most users will. Some big ol' wall of text EULA/ToS next time you login, you'll have to accept... or at first you'll deny and your emails will be a mess... then you go back and accept.
- gibwell 13y agoIt's highly relevant. If we say Google can scan your email just to support an arbitrary business model, how can we make an argument that the NSA should be prevented from doing it in the name of national security. It isn't a good thing for Google to try to make loss of privacy seem like business as usual.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- marshray 13y agoI don't like that Google would build a profile on me by scanning the contents of my emails, but it's an agreement I knowingly enter into when I occasionally use Gmail. But what about a non-Gmail-using party who sends emails to one or more Gmail users? Is Google building a dossier on them based on their return address? Are they associating that person's email with other tracking mechanisms Google employs? I don't know if Google does these things, but if they did, would it be OK? If some or all of the collected raw data is at most a 'probably foreign' request away for military spies, is it OK to scan and store every bit of data that would be permissible in a mutual-trust-based civil society?
- cynwoody 13y agoThat's easy. You signed up for Gmail knowing how your email service is being paid for. As for National Security, well, the hell with it! No role for a nation or security unless I get to define the parameters of my privacy! Snowden 2020! (When he'll be over 35 ;)).
- infocollector 13y ago1. Do we know that Google is only using this information to show Advertisements on Gmail? What else does it do with this information? (Suggestion to Google: Trade stocks automatically ;-) 2. Does Implicit consent argument make sense? 3. Perhaps scanning for spam can be done without looking at content? Or looking at content at the client side instead of server side? Lets for a moment assume that this is perfectly valid business model. Then what stops Windows from sending MS keywords, pictures and everything else from your home computer. Or sensor information from android/iphone to the parent companies. Not to mention every car/house that was made by now should be sending everything you speak inside the car to GM/Ford/Builders? Something does not sound right to me. A TOS should not allow a company to do whatever it wants with data.
- inerte 13y agoEverybody 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?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- asperous 13y agoI 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!"
- benologist 13y agoEmailing 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.
- asperous 13y ago
- eggnet 13y agoGoogle also has to scan your email to index it, for searching. And as far as privacy is concerned, that is the biggest danger, the NSA (or whoever) being able to ask google for all email with a certain keyword in it. To summarize, they scan for spam filtering to make email usable, advertising to make it free, and indexing for searching. I don't see how web based email can function without scanning it. And frankly, I don't see how high quality spam filtering can be done without scanning and sharing data across users in general, not specific to web mail.
- ma2rten 13y agoWhat does it even mean to "scan" emails? If Google receives the email, saves it to disk and later retrieves it again, maybe reformats it, is that really fundamentally different from a technical point of view? It's all bits and bytes after all. Targeted advertising is creepy to humans, because there is some notion that the computer "understands" what you are sending and builds up a profile about you. But, if you take a sober technical point of view, it's hard to accuse Google of anything. Maybe Google should educate it's users more how those ads are generated?
- znowi 13y agoGoogle lawyers are presenting a clever argument, which on the surface looks quite sensible. But the accusation is not about scanning, but wiretapping, which, as the judge notes "primarily used to create user profiles and to provide targeted advertising". It is not the same as sorting out email or looking for virus signatures in attachments. If you follow Google's notion of implicit consent to such practices, then any traffic online can be lawfully intercepted and profiled. When you send data over a third party router, you give permission to spy on yourself. I don't think so.
- deathanatos 13y ago> If you follow Google's notion of implicit consent to such practices, then any traffic online can be lawfully intercepted and profiled. When you send data over a third party router, you give permission to spy on yourself. I don't think so. I disagree. Google is not intercepting traffic willy nilly: you _sent_ the traffic to Google, when you emailed john.smith@google.com. Comparing Google reading traffic that was transmitted to it with a wholesale "any traffic online and be lawfully intercepted and profiled" is exaggerating the scope of what is going on here. Also, what is the prosecution hoping to gain here? If they win, and Google can't serve relevant ads… are we out of a good email service? (I suppose Google could still try to serve ads, but they just would be in the dark w.r.t. the email content.)
- dingaling 13y ago> you _sent_ the traffic to Google, when you emailed john.smith@google.com How about when you emailed @guardian.co.uk? @specsavers.com? Under the covers they're using Postini + Gmail. Did you consent to sending that traffic to Google? Wat about people living in LA, who have no option but to send their traffic to Google when they e-mail their local Government at @lacity.org? NOAA, State of Wyoming.. the list goes on. http://www.google.com/intx/en_uk/enterprise/apps/business/customers.html http://www.google.com/intx/en_uk/enterprise/apps/business/cu...
- cynwoody 13y agoGoogle's Gmail business model has been common knowledge ever since they surfaced it as a new, invitation-only beta. This whole debate about the appropriateness of a content-driven ad-supported business model has been front and center all along. It should be sorted out in the marketplace, not the court room.
- hrasyid 13y agoWow, how did they manage to find a judge who seems very knowledgeable on tech issues?
- walid 13y agoAnd how is scanning your email different from scanning your facebook posts both private and public. If the plaintiff wins, bye bye advertising supported services.