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I 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 wh

I 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 ago
Emailing 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
  Not agreeing to their terms, but acknowledging that the domain of your email will handle your email using their policies, and that the privacy of the content of your email is limited to whatever privacy policies the recipient domain has in place.
  - benologist 13y ago
    Strongly disagree with "acknowledging" which is really the same thing - automatic, implicit acceptance of whatever happens next. A domain and an email address don't imply anything by itself and it's impossible to know without significant research whose and what policies are in effect. You could arguably require one or more lawyers just to decipher what exactly you're subject to when you factor in different countries, company locations, server locations etc. Phones and web/desktop mail clients have made email addresses virtually invisible in lieu of our contacts' names, and the factors I mentioned in my other post make it impossible to ultimately know what inbox an email really ends up in anyway. Are we agreeing, or acknowledging, a telco's terms and conditions when we dial a number?

benologist 13y ago

Emailing 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
Not agreeing to their terms, but acknowledging that the domain of your email will handle your email using their policies, and that the privacy of the content of your email is limited to whatever privacy policies the recipient domain has in place.
- benologist 13y ago
  Strongly disagree with "acknowledging" which is really the same thing - automatic, implicit acceptance of whatever happens next. A domain and an email address don't imply anything by itself and it's impossible to know without significant research whose and what policies are in effect. You could arguably require one or more lawyers just to decipher what exactly you're subject to when you factor in different countries, company locations, server locations etc. Phones and web/desktop mail clients have made email addresses virtually invisible in lieu of our contacts' names, and the factors I mentioned in my other post make it impossible to ultimately know what inbox an email really ends up in anyway. Are we agreeing, or acknowledging, a telco's terms and conditions when we dial a number?