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Google sued for data-mining students' email
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Oletros 13y agoIs this a serious comment? Opt in for mail search, spam filtering and anti virus filtering?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sentenza 13y agoThe virus argument is to online life as the terrorist argument is to offline life. Everybody useds it as a cover to get at you for their own purposes. Recently, our glorious government here in Germany decided that there should be a new, secure way of online communication called De-Mail, implemented by the usual suspects (ISPs and the like). Secure means end-to-end encryption, right? Wrrronk! They encrypt the transport to and from the servers, but decrypt and reencrypt the data on the server, "to scan for viruses". Because viruses are really the most pressing problem today.
- madeofpalk 13y agoFor any email service to provide the features people expect (spam filtering, for one), it needs to 'read' the emails.
- Houshalter 13y agoYou have the option to opt out: don't use gmail. It's not a reasonable expectation that every single web service should be legally required to make every single feature opt-out-able.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Oletros 13y agoGoogle tell that
- dagw 13y agoIt's kind of hard to do your job or complete your education without ever using your company or school email address. I suppose you could counter argue that you can opt out of going to university or working for a company the uses Google Apps, but that is starting to get kind of silly in my mind.
- Houshalter 13y agoThen that is your company's problem, not Google. And that's not the argument I was making anyways.
- genericuser 13y agoIf you believe that strongly that none of your personal emails should fall into the hands of Google, how is it silly to choose a school / job that will respect that belief? I realize for the majority of people who would simply 'rather Google not have their information' the trade off and the additional effort on their part are simply not worth it, My point is that everyone who is 'forced to use Google mail' is unconsciously weighing their objection to it against the inconvenience it would cause them to avoid using it, and chooses to use Google (is forced to, if you prefer) because the possibly ill informed cost benefit analysis tells them using Google is worth it. I am sorry if this whole comment comes off trollish, but the the idea that people are forced to do things they are strongly against because they do not find the alternative to be convienent I believe to be a symptom of entitlement which is a problem with society (not a new problem) that I believe should be combated. Edit to clarify - My quotes come from no where and are not actual quotes just hypothetical, probably straw man statements that I have come to expect when issues like this are discussed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- not_paul_graham 13y agoThe plaintiffs are seeking payouts for millions of Gmail users. The financial damages would amount to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011. So assuming at least 1 million users, they are seeking: 1,000,000 users * $100 per user * 365 days per year * 2 years = ~ $73 billion in damages. I'm not commenting on whether data-mining on Google's part was right or wrong, but why isn't there any limit to the amount that companies can be sued for? It seems impractical for the people suing to sue for around 73 billion dollars when the product/service is essentially free.
- dagw 13y agoInitial damage claims are often made on the assumption that once all appeals and negotiations are done you'll be very lucky to walk away with even 5% of the original number.
- ronaldx 13y agoThe cost of the product is surely irrelevant here: If the product damages your life (in an unexpected way), you should be able to sue to recoup those damages. In this case, presumably the individuals may have been signed up to Google Apps for Education without their direct consent (or, it was an unstated requirement of their courses to sign up). Also note: companies have access to liability insurance to cover them for being sued out of existence. Google presumably have a budget for lawsuits.
- Tomdarkness 13y agoMy experience with Google Apps is when you create a new user the first time they log in they are presented with the T&Cs they have to agree to before they can use the account.
- prawn 13y agoIf this Apps for Education platform is targeted at children, are many unable to consent to terms perhaps?
- Zenst 13y agoFirstly the EULA (which nobody reads) does cover this and then the aspect of you get what you pay for and again their choice compeletely how they wish to spend thier money, or not in this case as it is a free service they are using. Also the cusomised ad advertising is an option you can opt out of, so once again I'm not understanding the issue here beyond grabbing some headlines for mistakes that were avoidable on many levels.
- lumpygravy 13y agoAlso the cusomised ad advertising is an option you can opt out of, so once again I'm not understanding the issue here beyond grabbing some headlines for mistakes that were avoidable on many levels. As far as I understood from previous coverage and reading the privacy policy, the point is that e-mails are mined even if ads are turned of for the domain. The resulting profiles are then used for showing contextual advertisements in services that are not in Google Apps (e.g. Google search and Google+). Google's lawyers have also admitted that this is true. IANAL, but reading the privacy policy and the ToS for Business accounts, it seems to be the same there. Of course, you can completely opt out of interest-based ads, both on Google services as on Google ads across the web. But I assume that profiles are still built, if not used. A related problem is that persons sending e-mail to a GMail address (which could be hidden behind a non-gmail domain) never consented to the ToS and their e-mails are profiled. To which Google's reaction was: "all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing." [1] IMO there is a difference between scanning e-mail for spam and viruses, and using the content to build a profile of the sender or receiver. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gma...
- Houshalter 13y agoIf you send an email to a gmail user of course you are consenting for their email service to process the email. Things like spam filtering and preloading images depend on this.
- onion2k 13y agoYou could be consenting for the email service to do reasonable processing on each individual email (eg filtering and preloading). Sending an email doesn't necessarily have to give the receiving agent permission to build a profile for the specific sender that maps all the emails they send to the service to multiple, separate recipients on to a single graph. Also, with Google's "Google Apps for Business", a user can use their own domain for their email. Sending someone an email doesn't inform the sender that they could be contributing to a Google profile.
- magicalist 13y agoYou can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.
- mgkimsal 13y ago"but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far." There's nothing implied in sending an email beyond "I want you to read the contents". If there's more I want you to do, those wishes would be in the email itself. 30 years ago, if I wrote a paper letter to a company, I was not implying that I want them to build up a profile of me based on my stated info compared to the stated info of other people, where my letter came from, type of stationary, quality of my grammar, etc., then send me coupons that match the behavior they expect of people of my profile. I am implying that I want them to read my letter and take care of my request.
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- account99282 13y agoThe suit maintains that, because such non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail users never signed on to Google's terms of services, they can never have given, in Google's terms, "implied consent" to scan their email. This. One victim is the private mailing list: There's always at least one sap who subscribes using google mail. My personal hope is that suits like this will one day push them to discontinue gmail.
- scrollaway 13y agoOh, look, a troll.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoBut this is nonsense. The sender doesn't need to consent; the recipient has all the legal power over his mail. If I want to engage a company to keep files on all my paper mail, and all associated metadata, there's nothing you can do to stop me.
- e12e 13y ago> If I want to engage a company to keep files on all my paper mail, and all associated metadata, there's nothing you can do to stop me. (my emphasis) Well, in Norway I could report the company for storing personal data without a license to do so. Essentially any database (even list of phone numbers[1]) that contains personal data (name, contact information, any other information) is regulated. The laws have been somewhat modernized, so that it is assumed that it is ok for a school to give out (and keep) contact information to households/parents of a class -- or for a business to keep a database of customers, for example -- but you most certainly are not allowed to "just keep a lot of data on people because you can". If you were to do it as a private person, you would most likely never get caught, of course -- but as a business you'd essentially be committing a crime -- and could face (rather steep) fines. This is why Norway (along with a few other European countries) have taken a rather dim view of Facebook -- and note that with Facebook, users do consent in general (barring the shadow profiles, information uploaded by users regarding non-users etc).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- facepalm 13y agoWhat do they mean by "Google is reading our mail" - has Google reached sentience? Just to display it on GMail, one of Google's servers has to read the mail. If they claim that Google has achieved sentience, the implications could be very far reaching... I mean perhaps this lawsuit will clarify when algorithms will be considered sentient.
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoIt's interesting how corporations are only people when it's convenient.
- throwaway2048 13y agothe exact same arguments could be applied to the NSA
- facepalm 13y agoExcept that the NSA doesn't have a website for checking my mail and I am not explicitly sending my mail to them.
- throwaway2048 13y agoyour post had nothing to do with that, you claimed google wasnt "reading" email because it was all automatic scripts, behind some facetious rhetoric. The situation with the NSA collecting and reading email is no different, specificly in terms of datamining the contents.
- facepalm 13y agoI wasn't claiming anything, I am asking what it is supposed to mean. It's interesting that a machine reading something can be described as the action of a juristic person. I do think the implications would be that web mail becomes impossible. What exact part of "reading" is a privacy violation?
- hamax 13y ago
- driverdan 13y agoOriginal, non-blogspam article: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht... Original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427368
- LammyL 13y agoIt is really interesting how people get so concerned when google "reads" their email to target ads at them, but they expect google to "read" their email to filter spam. The machine act of text processing of the email is same in both cases, yet only one is offensive to users.