> Google “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages”<p>I don't understand the concept of "opening up" an email. Comparing digital things to physical objects is always going to cause problems because they're <i>not</i>.<p>> “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”<p>Of course they must, in at least some sense. They've got to be processed by various programs to store them in the right place. We also expect them to be scanned and filtered for spam and viruses, which require them being processed.<p>> 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.<p>1) Of course it must, for the reasons above.<p>2) If you send anything to someone else, they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. You're sending an email to someone that has promised to let another company scan it.
Why is that even a question? Of course it's legal. It's in the terms of using their service in the first place. Nobody's forcing anybody to use Gmail, after all.
Probably the plaintiffs believe in good faith that they are pushing for positive social change against a nefarious practice (and they certainly seem misguided, at best, to me). But<p>-It's a class-action suit. It's not unlikely the driving force behind organizing the class was the plaintiff's law firm looking for a long shot bet at a cut of a big payout, a reputation-making case, etc. I have no idea if this is the case. The incentives around this kind of thing are varied and not necessarily at all high-minded though.<p>-It bugs me when people start to think of the Googles of the world as a public utility. Assuming that you could make the world a better place by regulating their behaviour into something socially desirable is short-sighted. We have gmail because Google can monetize it with ads. Treating firms like Google as public utilities subject to public interest based regulation is not that different from treating banks as public utilities that are too big to fail (granted that's a complicated issue on its own)<p>“People believe, for better or worse, that their email is private correspondence, not subject to the eyes of a $180 billion corporation and its whims,” said Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court.<p>-I automatically get suspicious when would-be social reformers throw in the market cap of a company like this, as if to say, come on, they can afford to share the wealth. In a system where there's rule of law, it should be that that the practice is either legal or it isn't, right?<p>-It could well be that California has statutes on the books that clearly make this sort of thing illegal. If that's the case, we should fully support the plaintiff's winning, followed by brisk lobbying of legislators to correct the ridiculousness. Selective enforcement of bad laws is a horrible practice that opens the door to all kinds of arbitrariness and manipulation by the state. See rule of law.
You need to scan to detect spam, so scanning itself can't be a legal problem.<p>I don't see the issue here. The ads are not even slightly surreptitious, and they don't seem to be linked to your non-email ad profile. (They don't follow you across the web.)<p>(Would it be a problem if they were? Is there a fundamental legal issue here, is it it more of a transparency/disclosure problem?)
I have a hard time imagining the problems with this. This is a case of the "Chinese Room": The scanning in the advertising isn't 'understanding' what you wrote, so its completely different from if a person was reading your e-mail.<p>I would like it if one day we could start to make that distinction.
Applying the same logic, would it be fine for me to sell someone a house, keep a key and then take pictures of their rooms every few days so I can advertise to them correctly?
What is it 2004?! of course it's legal, same as "scanning" mail content to identify spam or enable full text search. This lawsuit is ridiculous, it's either a money making scam or a PR stunt or both.