This seems like an interesting philosophical question -- after all, the sender never agreed to let Google read her emails, right? But I think the resolution is that the receiver <i>did</i> agree to let Google read both emails she sends and emails she receives. Once the receiver "receives" the email, Google has permission to read it regardless of how the sender feels about it (if the sender didn't want them read, she shouldn't have given them to a receiver who would agree to this).<p>But Google wasn't using that argument apparently; rather they were claiming that the sender gave "implicit" consent -- not sure if this seems obviously true to me....
I'm more comfortable with Google scanning my mails than the NSA or my government...<p>Google is just using it for ads, but the government can construct whatever paranoid stuff from my mails.
This is absurd. How is Google 'intercepting' emails when Gmail is the service from which they originate? Furthermore, Google's TOS seems pretty straightforward.
This is pure insanity, the emails are also "read" by code that determines whether it is spam, promotional, social, or another type of message. The emails are "read" by code that determines how to render them in the browser. They are "read" by code that writes them into a search index.<p>Why one of these things constitutes an "intercept" and not the others don't is ridiculous- whether the action is in the "normal order of business". The definition of intercept as the "acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic, or oral communication" simply can't apply to just one of these things.<p>By the Plaintiffs' arguments, any system on the internet that forwards an SMTP packet is an unlawful intercept, because it has to acquire the contents to copy them from one channel to another.<p>All of the decisions on this seem to be based on the scenario where an intercept involves a person listening to a phone call. I would submit, that if it is just code reading the email that was intentionally sent to the system the code is running on, it is not really being intercepted.
The fact that it is "wiretapping laws" that are relevant seems a little odd, along with the idea of Google "intercepting" emails. As far as "intercepting" goes, is there really a line between "store in a database and display on screen when a user requests it" and "analyse (without human interaction) the contents to show adverts related to it"? Both are just a computer reading and writing the content of the email.
I hope the judge in this case realises that Google necessarily has to receive, store, and parse all the emails sent through it in order to function as an email service. I'm not clear on what exactly the article means by "scan" in this case, but a mail service simply isn't a mail service if it doesn't examine and process the contents of emails.<p>Whether or not Google should be allowed to perform additional processing of the emails in order to choose appropriate advertising is a separate issue. I'm concerned that a lot of articles are missing this critical distinction. The focus of the debate needs to be whether they can deliver advertising which is based wholly or partially on the content of your emails; they fundamentally <i>have</i> to (electronically) read your emails in order to deliver them to recipients.
Well decided. Gmail is very deceptive about how advertising works, which juxtaposes against the claims in court about how wonderful it is. If scanning is so wonderful, don't try to to conceal it from users.<p>Let's get the NSA before this judge next.
Apparently the NSA should get into the ad serving business to fund themselves because they are the only ones legally authorized by congress and the president to read and store everyone's content.
Consider how it would be if the NSA passed our email through a system that uses machine learning to generate a list of suspects, but no human analyst read the body text of any message.<p>Somehow I don't think we'd say that they haven't intercepted the email.