6 ms·

If 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

If 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 ago
You 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 ago
  You 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.
    - magicalist 13y ago
      That wouldn't be a parallel situation. The parallel would be you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons that match the behavior they expect of people that get the kind of mail that you do. You may not like that trade, but fortunately you don't have to make it (or you can go get the business version). Meanwhile, no, you have no right to dictate how I contract out how I handle my mail by sending me a letter. You gave me that letter, and you'd have a difficult time making a case even if I then proceeded to make thousands of physical copies of it and distributed it at a street corner.
      - Oletros 13y ago
        Google is not handling your mail, it is handling the receiver email
        thaumasiotes 13y ago
        You don't have any rights in a physical letter you send away. There would be no issue with the recipient engaging a service to handle letters that happen to be sent to them, and that service processing those letters however they saw fit, including by recording information about the sender(s). I guess what I'm saying is... what's your point? edit: You appear to be misreading your parent comment. The parallel situation they describe is precisely that the recipient engages a company to process their mail (read the description: "you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons [for] people who get the kind of mail that you do". All of that applies to receiving mail, not sending it.) And this is precisely what's happening with Google: if you send mail to my gmail address, I've engaged Google to process it on my behalf. You have no say in the matter, nor can you.
        Oletros 13y ago
        Yes, I think I missreaded it
      - 13y ago
  - onion2k 13y ago
    I wouldn't argue that the recipient, eg the Google email account holder, has much claim on how Google profiles him. He has chosen to use Google's service. I'm talking about the sender. For example I use onion2k@myemailprovider.com to send emails to alice@gmail.com, bob@gmail.com and charlie@gmail.com. Google now have a profile for onion2k@myemailprovider.com with a graph that includes nodes for alice@, bob@ and charlie@ and edges for the relationships between the four people, and links to anything we've discussed. If david@gmail.com then sends an email to onion2k@myemailprovider.com Google know that david@ has a second order link to alice@, bob@ and charlie@ despite the fact that they have never communicated or informed Google of this relationship, because Google have a profile based on onion2k@myemailprovider.com - an address that Google might not have a justifiable reason to be building a profile on. Whether or not you believe that is a reasonable use of data is up to you. Some people think it's not.
    - magicalist 13y ago
      I don't understand. Any email provider can reconstruct that kind of relationship. What's special about Google in that case?
      - onion2k 13y ago
        Google aren't special in this case. They're simply the one we know do data mining on email for their ad network, so they're the one we're talking about. If it came to light that other email providers who also run ad networks (or share data with ad networks) were doing the same thing then people would ask the same questions of them.
    - Oletros 13y ago
      This is assuming that Google profiles onion2k@myemailprovider.com But does Google profiles it?
    - hexagonc 13y ago
      If david@gmail.com then sends an email to onion2k@myemailprovider.com Google know that david@ has a second order link to alice@, bob@ and charlie@ I'm not sure at all that it is clear what the nature of that link is. I have no insight into the gmail's email relationship modeling but I suspect that it doesn't automatically build a relationship between david@gmail.com and other people that onion2k contacted. For one thing, it would be impractical to do this across all possible relationships -- there would be polynomial growth of the adjacency matrix with no information gain to justify it. Ask yourself, what does it mean that david contacted onion2k and onion2k, at some point in time, contacted alice, bob, and charlie? Unless you already know something nontrivial about these people, you assume they are independent. I guess my point is that data analysis can be very costly; it is reason that humans have a hard time dealing with meaningful relationships spanning more than about 150 people[1]. Even a company with Google's resources would be overwhelmed if it had to store and take into account a large number of mostly (I mean, vastly mostly) meaningless relationships. At the least, it takes away resources from the relationship graphs that do matter and which are actionable, such as the graphs of spammers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
dagw 13y ago
How do I know whether someone is a gmail user or not when they're using their own domain?
- aDevilInMe 13y ago
  You can check out the mx settings for the domain using one of the free online tools. If they have already sent you a message then you can look at the raw source of the email to see who and how it was sent.
  - lumpygravy 13y ago
    You can check out the mx settings for the domain using one of the free online tools. Except that people who are on regular GMail will probably use e-mail forwarding provided by their domain registrar. Especially since the free Google Apps for domains is gone.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    It doesn't matter anyways. I might have a robot read every personal email I get to my entire household and I wouldn't need to disclose that to every person that sends me email. I can forward all of them to a virtual personal assistant in Mumbai and have them deal with it all, just sending me a daily summary and maybe writing some auto-responses for me, and there'd be no need for me to disclose that fact to every person that writes me an email. You can do the same thing with physical mail as well...there are services that can receive your mail, scan it, and send me stuff that seems relevant. No need for people to be able to figure out that you're doing that. The fact is that I can contract that sort of thing out however I like. It's my mail once I receive it. I think it should be required for students to be protected when they have to use an email system when attending a school, so go ahead and get a firm statement from google on that, but the main part of this class action, the people sending email to people with gmail addresses, are barking up the wrong tree.
mattmanser 13y ago
If you send a letter to an address of course you are consenting for the postman to read your mail. This is all about moving from offline to online. In the ancient days pre-email it was a non-trivial task to read every single letter being sent in a country, categorize them all and then profile people based on them. And the countries that did that weren't somewhere you wanted to live. In the modern age it's a "feature" that companies provide because "if you're not paying for it, you're the product". Not that I think it's necessarily bad, but boundaries have to be set for this new age and this law suit is simply part of that process. Just look at it from a different perspective. (And note that spam filters & image preloading are problems that only need to be solved because of the same new trivial cost of automated malicious actions)
- Houshalter 13y ago
  >If you send a letter to an address of course you are consenting for the postman to read your mail. It's more like if the person you are sending to hires an assistant to sort and organize their mail for them (which people actually do.) You then go and sue the assistant.
  - belorn 13y ago
    If the assistant read confidential mail that they have not been approved to do, yes, they can get sued for that. Many people sign NDA's. If you have an assistant read mails covered by the NDA, then the party who sent the mail can sue. and so on and so on.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Perhaps, but that seems pretty unreasonable. The assistant doesn't know that, and we can't ban assistants entirely because some people aren't responsible with their own mail. I'm not sure how common it is, and it's probably less so now with email, but I'd guess a lot of important people do have their assistants screen their confidential mail. For example, I know politicians often have people help with their mail.
cottonseed 13y ago
For a long time I had used an email that forwarded to gmail. Nobody who used that email would know it was going to gmail. (I have mostly moved away from Google product since.)

If 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 ago

You 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 ago
You 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.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    That wouldn't be a parallel situation. The parallel would be you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons that match the behavior they expect of people that get the kind of mail that you do. You may not like that trade, but fortunately you don't have to make it (or you can go get the business version). Meanwhile, no, you have no right to dictate how I contract out how I handle my mail by sending me a letter. You gave me that letter, and you'd have a difficult time making a case even if I then proceeded to make thousands of physical copies of it and distributed it at a street corner.
    - Oletros 13y ago
      Google is not handling your mail, it is handling the receiver email
      - thaumasiotes 13y ago
        You don't have any rights in a physical letter you send away. There would be no issue with the recipient engaging a service to handle letters that happen to be sent to them, and that service processing those letters however they saw fit, including by recording information about the sender(s). I guess what I'm saying is... what's your point? edit: You appear to be misreading your parent comment. The parallel situation they describe is precisely that the recipient engages a company to process their mail (read the description: "you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons [for] people who get the kind of mail that you do". All of that applies to receiving mail, not sending it.) And this is precisely what's happening with Google: if you send mail to my gmail address, I've engaged Google to process it on my behalf. You have no say in the matter, nor can you.
        Oletros 13y ago
        Yes, I think I missreaded it
    - 13y ago
- onion2k 13y ago
  I wouldn't argue that the recipient, eg the Google email account holder, has much claim on how Google profiles him. He has chosen to use Google's service. I'm talking about the sender. For example I use onion2k@myemailprovider.com to send emails to alice@gmail.com, bob@gmail.com and charlie@gmail.com. Google now have a profile for onion2k@myemailprovider.com with a graph that includes nodes for alice@, bob@ and charlie@ and edges for the relationships between the four people, and links to anything we've discussed. If david@gmail.com then sends an email to onion2k@myemailprovider.com Google know that david@ has a second order link to alice@, bob@ and charlie@ despite the fact that they have never communicated or informed Google of this relationship, because Google have a profile based on onion2k@myemailprovider.com - an address that Google might not have a justifiable reason to be building a profile on. Whether or not you believe that is a reasonable use of data is up to you. Some people think it's not.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    I don't understand. Any email provider can reconstruct that kind of relationship. What's special about Google in that case?
    - onion2k 13y ago
      Google aren't special in this case. They're simply the one we know do data mining on email for their ad network, so they're the one we're talking about. If it came to light that other email providers who also run ad networks (or share data with ad networks) were doing the same thing then people would ask the same questions of them.
  - Oletros 13y ago
    This is assuming that Google profiles onion2k@myemailprovider.com But does Google profiles it?
  - hexagonc 13y ago
    If david@gmail.com then sends an email to onion2k@myemailprovider.com Google know that david@ has a second order link to alice@, bob@ and charlie@ I'm not sure at all that it is clear what the nature of that link is. I have no insight into the gmail's email relationship modeling but I suspect that it doesn't automatically build a relationship between david@gmail.com and other people that onion2k contacted. For one thing, it would be impractical to do this across all possible relationships -- there would be polynomial growth of the adjacency matrix with no information gain to justify it. Ask yourself, what does it mean that david contacted onion2k and onion2k, at some point in time, contacted alice, bob, and charlie? Unless you already know something nontrivial about these people, you assume they are independent. I guess my point is that data analysis can be very costly; it is reason that humans have a hard time dealing with meaningful relationships spanning more than about 150 people[1]. Even a company with Google's resources would be overwhelmed if it had to store and take into account a large number of mostly (I mean, vastly mostly) meaningless relationships. At the least, it takes away resources from the relationship graphs that do matter and which are actionable, such as the graphs of spammers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

dagw 13y ago

How do I know whether someone is a gmail user or not when they're using their own domain?

aDevilInMe 13y ago
You can check out the mx settings for the domain using one of the free online tools. If they have already sent you a message then you can look at the raw source of the email to see who and how it was sent.
- lumpygravy 13y ago
  You can check out the mx settings for the domain using one of the free online tools. Except that people who are on regular GMail will probably use e-mail forwarding provided by their domain registrar. Especially since the free Google Apps for domains is gone.
- magicalist 13y ago
  It doesn't matter anyways. I might have a robot read every personal email I get to my entire household and I wouldn't need to disclose that to every person that sends me email. I can forward all of them to a virtual personal assistant in Mumbai and have them deal with it all, just sending me a daily summary and maybe writing some auto-responses for me, and there'd be no need for me to disclose that fact to every person that writes me an email. You can do the same thing with physical mail as well...there are services that can receive your mail, scan it, and send me stuff that seems relevant. No need for people to be able to figure out that you're doing that. The fact is that I can contract that sort of thing out however I like. It's my mail once I receive it. I think it should be required for students to be protected when they have to use an email system when attending a school, so go ahead and get a firm statement from google on that, but the main part of this class action, the people sending email to people with gmail addresses, are barking up the wrong tree.

mattmanser 13y ago

If you send a letter to an address of course you are consenting for the postman to read your mail. This is all about moving from offline to online. In the ancient days pre-email it was a non-trivial task to read every single letter being sent in a country, categorize them all and then profile people based on them. And the countries that did that weren't somewhere you wanted to live. In the modern age it's a "feature" that companies provide because "if you're not paying for it, you're the product". Not that I think it's necessarily bad, but boundaries have to be set for this new age and this law suit is simply part of that process. Just look at it from a different perspective. (And note that spam filters & image preloading are problems that only need to be solved because of the same new trivial cost of automated malicious actions)

Houshalter 13y ago
>If you send a letter to an address of course you are consenting for the postman to read your mail. It's more like if the person you are sending to hires an assistant to sort and organize their mail for them (which people actually do.) You then go and sue the assistant.
- belorn 13y ago
  If the assistant read confidential mail that they have not been approved to do, yes, they can get sued for that. Many people sign NDA's. If you have an assistant read mails covered by the NDA, then the party who sent the mail can sue. and so on and so on.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Perhaps, but that seems pretty unreasonable. The assistant doesn't know that, and we can't ban assistants entirely because some people aren't responsible with their own mail. I'm not sure how common it is, and it's probably less so now with email, but I'd guess a lot of important people do have their assistants screen their confidential mail. For example, I know politicians often have people help with their mail.

cottonseed 13y ago

For a long time I had used an email that forwarded to gmail. Nobody who used that email would know it was going to gmail. (I have mostly moved away from Google product since.)