What do they mean by "Google is reading our mail" - has Google reached sentience?<p>Just to display it on GMail, one of Google's servers has to read the mail. If they claim that Google has achieved sentience, the implications could be very far reaching...<p>I mean perhaps this lawsuit will clarify when algorithms will be considered sentient.
<i>The plaintiffs are seeking payouts for millions of Gmail users. The financial damages would amount to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011.</i><p>So assuming at least 1 million users, they are seeking:<p>1,000,000 users * $100 per user * 365 days per year * 2 years = ~ $73 billion in damages.<p>I'm not commenting on whether data-mining on Google's part was right or wrong, but why isn't there any limit to the amount that companies can be sued for?<p>It seems impractical for the people suing to sue for around 73 billion dollars when the product/service is essentially free.
<i>The suit maintains that, because such non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail users never signed on to Google's terms of services, they can never have given, in Google's terms, "implied consent" to scan their email.</i><p>This. One victim is the private mailing list: There's always at least one sap who subscribes using google mail.<p>My personal hope is that suits like this will one day push them to discontinue gmail.
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.
Firstly the EULA (which nobody reads) does cover this and then the aspect of you get what you pay for and again their choice compeletely how they wish to spend thier money, or not in this case as it is a free service they are using.<p>Also the cusomised ad advertising is an option you can opt out of, so once again I'm not understanding the issue here beyond grabbing some headlines for mistakes that were avoidable on many levels.
It is really interesting how people get so concerned when google "reads" their email to target ads at them, but they expect google to "read" their email to filter spam. The machine act of text processing of the email is same in both cases, yet only one is offensive to users.