“Google’s attorneys say their long-running practice of electronically scanning the contents of people’s Gmail accounts to help sell ads is legal, and are asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to stop the practice,” Martha Mendoza reports for The Associated Press.
“The class action lawsuit, filed in May, says Google ‘unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages’ in violation of California’s privacy laws and federal wiretapping statutes,” Mendoza reports. “The lawsuit notes that the company even scans messages sent to any of the 425 million active Gmail users from non-Gmail users who never agreed to the company’s terms.”
Mendoza reports, “Google says the process is fully automated, ‘and no humans read your email…'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
No shame!
Many of my friends and family members having Gmail accounts,
I hope Yahoo! don’t do this dirty tricks.
Yes, AT&T/Yahoo email also do the same.
I’ve never seen ads anywhere in my Yahoo email.
Free does not equal Freedom
Hey, it is what your neighborhood drug dealer offers!
Capone couldn’t be touched for bootlegging and smuggling but he was eventually brought down on tax evasion charges.
Google, guilty of intellectual property theft, may finally be taken down on privacy concerns.
I hope so – best way to hit snoopgle is to tell all your friends and families NOT USE USE THEM
Tried it. They just look at you as if you are insane. I think their, “Do no evil”, LIE has percolated into the minds of the general populace. Say it enough and it becomes true. It is also, unfortunately, a hallmark of 90% of the people who have ever set foot in the oval office.
So it is ok an automat reads my mail and based on its content, stuffs my and my mailing partners with related shyte? The mailman that does that to my snailmail get a punch in the face. Its too bad we need spamfilters but this kind of profiling is just plain BAD.
The mailman (or anyone else) that does the same thing with traditional snail mail goes to jail. That is a crime.
Somehow, digital information is somehow (mistakenly, IMO) perceived as inherently less deserving of privacy perspective. So, if you write it on paper and slap it in a stamped and addressed envelope, you have the full protection of the law. But type the same thing into your email app and send it to the same person and it is apparently ripe for “automated scanning” with no repercussions or even a presumption of privacy.
Something is terribly wrong with this picture.
Note something you said: ” … in a stamped and addressed envelope”. The stamp cost money. You are in fact PAYING for a service. With GMail, unless you have a corporate account, you are not PAYING. If people want something for nothing, then they need to realize the piper still needs to be paid and he/she will get their pound of flesh in anyway they pretty much please.
Actually, not quite correct. Your g-mail service is paid for by advertisers who by web page space on the g-mail web pages in order to show their ads while you are reading your g-mail (through the web interface). This is not the point of contention here; every single provider of free e-mail around the world supports the service in the same way. They sell advertising space, and about the only way they enhance that offering is by breaking down the space based on users’ profiles and information that the users provided when they signed up. What they DON’T do is rummage through their users’ content (messages, chats, mapping location information, purchase history, etc), regardless of what the justification for that may be.
Google stands alone in the way they treat their users’ data. Free service can be offered in various ways. This is not unique to Google.
I wonder why my girlfriend’s computer yields search results that have STD test ads in the sidebars?
If only the scanning were used for advertising efforts.
1) Either set up a free gmail address or get the assistance of someone who already has one.
2) Setup a new web page somewhere and do not link to it from anywhere.
3) email a link to the page to the gmail account from step one.
4) start watching your web server logs. In a couple if days you’ll see googlebot come visit!
If they get barred from scanning the email, Gmail will shut down, just like how they’ve killed off some of their other services.
… and the world would be a better place.
ad-supported services may be annoying, but with privacy protections, are relatively harmless.
Google and Facebook’s datamining + insidious ad services, on the other hand, are the very definition of evil. They take without telling the user what has been taken. Alas, the mass populace always falls for whatever is “free”. Wake up, people.
I sure hope that Apple icloud/mobileme/mac.com are not being scanned also. I certainly don’t think so, but one can never know.
There are no ads and apple uses the money from sales of premium products for cloud services. They probably factor in the number of cloud services used in the lifespan of a device to the product price. And also Apple just doesn’t care about what you email about.
+1 🙂
Methinks the rise of think-for-you-dumb-human services like Google Now will trump user concerns over privacy and Apple will be forced to put Siri into that race. Amazon will put Evi into the mix. AI is here. Watson beat the Jeopardy champs. We’ll all have Alzheimer’s and early age related dementia from lack of brain usage, just as we have an obesity epidemic partly from engineering most of our physical movement from our environment.
Privacy? What’s that?
Google wants the money in your wallet, and they will do anything to get it.
No one is surprised by this, right?
John Gilmore takes apart Google’s GMail Terms of Service
http://craphound.com/gilmoreongmail.html
There is just one word for Google’s electronic eavesdropping: UNACCEPTABLE!!!
This is why I use Ravetree and DuckDuckGo instead of facebook and google. If you actually look, then you will find that there are already good alternatives to the “Big Brother” sites. If we support these other sites, then they will only get better.
I thought everybody knew that Gmail is scanned. That was promoted as a feature when they launched the service. It allows them to index the messages so you can retrieve them from any computer, not just one with a local archive and index. That costs money, which they recoup through advertising. Otherwise, they would have to charge a monthly or per-message fee. Anybody who signs up for a “free” account from a for-profit provider is going to pay for it in some way–the Gmail business model is hardly a secret. Don’t like it, don’t sign up for the service.
BS ! What are you on Google’s BOD ?
When I signed on to Gmail it was in the very early stages years ago and they didn’t tell me it was scanned. And no I don’t expect it just because the service is free. Do all the other free email services pull this shit ? No!
Goddamn motherfuckers. This story was in my local newspaper’s website this AM and pissed me off to no end. It makes my blood boil and makes me want go postal on those assholes at Google. I have my gmail address registered all over so abandoning it would be a huge bloody pain. Fuck them hard and I hope they lose.
What a great excuse for BERZERKING.
Write emails containing marketing triggers you find amusing. (Not a good idea to include NSA trigger words unless your point is to berzerk them specifically).
Pink tire iron
Hello Tarantula
Pikachu pony
“Save The Flea” petition
My little rat lice
Caster oil cocktails
X-ray hair curlers
Anti-gravity shipping rates
Watercolor suppositories
Forever ear wax
Ipecac cherries
Invisibility doormat
… The possibilities are endless.
Or we could all simply stop using Gmail. I barely touch the stuff.
Whenever I have to reply to an email sent via Gmail, I use Yahoo. They deserve each other.
I don’t see how this is even a privacy issue, given no humans ever read the email. When nothing private is revealed to anyone, where is the privacy violation? When no one is eavesdropping on you, how is that eavesdropping?
What, do people think Google’s bots so sophisticated, that it’s like a living being is actually reading their email? Like Google’s bots are going to actually read your mail and really comprehend it and make judgements about you based on it? How ridiculous!
If you don’t want a computers to perform automated actions with your email – well I guess you should stick to snail mail, because that’s how email works. Or better yet: just get over it
Off topic question: If Googles scanning your email is potentially in violation of “federal wiretapping statutes” then how is the NSA’s Prism acceptable? Who wrote the warrant allowing NSA to monitor all your electronic communication at their will.
I’m still not clear if Apple OS’s include Prism.
Snail Mail is surveilled as well.
http://tinyurl.com/kzlzmgt
Welcome to the brave new world.