“Back in February, in a San Jose courtroom, a bombshell was dropped that could have been erased from the public record,” Thomas R. Burke and Jonathan Segal report for USA Today. “t turns out that Google, which bases its business on collecting and analyzing huge reams of data for advertising purposes, has been scanning users’ emails even before users have a chance to open or read them, including email messages that are deleted without being opened. Google knows what’s in your email before you do.”
“The revelation came in a now-settled legal dispute over Google’s Gmail service. Dozens of the nation’s largest newspapers and media companies fought to make sure that the case — and its wide-ranging implications for Internet users — received a full public airing,” Burke and Segal report. “Google tried, and failed, to redact information about its email scanning process from a transcript of a public court hearing. Last month, the judge in the case ruled that portions of the transcript from that February hearing could not be redacted retroactively, since that would be tantamount to closing a public courtroom.”
“We now know much more about how Google collects personal information from users of Gmail and Google Apps,” Burke and Segal report. “As the plaintiffs explained: ‘Google made a choice. They said, you know what, when people are accessing emails by an iPhone, we are not able to get their information. When people aren’t opening their emails or they are deleting them, we are not able to get their information. When people are using Google Apps accounts where ads are disabled, we are not able to get that information. When people are accessing Gmail through some other email provider, we are not able to get that information. So what they did is they took a device that was in existence already and operating just fine back in the storage area, and they moved it to the delivery pipeline.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: At this point, seeing .gmail as someone’s main email account screams “noob!” even more than those who still use .aol.
If you don’t already, we highly recommend using iCloud Mail. More info here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]