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 not.
> “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”
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.
> 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.
1) Of course it must, for the reasons above.
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.
You can look at it same way as you look at "opening a file". Similarly, "read" and "acquire" can also be thought of in a digital way, rather than analog and it's perfectly comparable in this context in my opinion. It's also true, they do "open", "read" and "acquire" contents, even if done by automated, digital means (programs, algos). Now whether that is or should be unlawful, I don't know.
The devil is on the details, as usual. If Google scans them with the intention of selling ads then they probably keep a dossier of your preferences or the type of emails you receive/d based on keywords. On a more personal level they could know that you have AIDS, are pregnant, going through marital problems...
Also NSA, DEA, FBI, IRS, The ObamaCare Enforcement Squad the local Sherif and who knows what will love to have a historical view of your emails, even after your emails have been deleted and forgotten. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/09/dea-pays-t-a... . Do you trust what Google tells you about the process? If it's there it's ready to be accessed, leaked, stolen or taken with an administrative subpoena.
But yeah, if they tell you upfront and don't violate any laws, I guess it's OK. Of course people and competitors reserve the right to point it out and criticize it.
It is, which is why seeing such poor analogies ruins the debate. There is an interesting discussion to be had, but we're doomed to be stuck in a mire of examples with postcards being delivered by scrooglers.
Processing emails in some fashion simply has to happen. But after that it becomes a tradeoff.
I might be fine with having targeted adverts within gmail, but not on external sites. I might be fine with it anywhere, and consider my emails to be equivalent to loyalty cards.
> On a more personal level they could know that you have AIDS, are pregnant, going through marital problems...
Of course they would, the data is all there. It has to be, it's in the data you're asking them to store on their servers! What they do with that information is the important thing.
> If it's there it's ready to be accessed, leaked, stolen or taken with an administrative subpoena.
As it is anywhere.
(do not infer that _I_ think that scanning emails to show ads _should_ be illegal)
So clearly there are contractual acts that are illegal. This one isn't, and I find it odd that people would expect it to be, especially given that people don't otherwise seem to care about privacy at all - as long as somebody in arguable authority says it's for their safety from Bad Guys.
I think there are a couple of audiences who are; ( 1 ) employees of companies ( or students of institutions ) that have migrated to Gmail / GApps and ( 2 ) senders of e-mails who are unaware that one or more recipients are Gmail users.
For protecting the latter group, it is possible to configure most MTAs to hold or decline delivering to Gmail or any other arbitrary domain. For example, postfix has the 'smtpd_recipient_restrictions' directive.
Then again, I suppose theoretically that's true of any large email provider. It just seems more egregious from Google since they are reading 3rd party emails to deliver ads...
-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.
-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)
“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.
-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?
-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.
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.)
(Would it be a problem if they were? Is there a fundamental legal issue here, is it it more of a transparency/disclosure problem?)
This is something I feel could be. I don't expect my emails to be somehow secret to google, and having targeted ads within gmail is fine by me. However I don't like the idea of them popping up on external sites when visited with my browser, or a browser I've used. There they could be revealing information about me to external parties.
I would like it if one day we could start to make that distinction.
