
Gmail scanning may violate federal wiretapping laws, judge finds - rubikscube
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2050080/googles-gmail-scanning-unclear-to-users-judge-finds.html
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bo1024
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 _did_ 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).

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....

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cynwoody
IANAL, but wouldn't Google be acting as the recipient's chosen agent to help
him communicate via email?

E.g., what if the recipient has a paid human assistant who screens his email,
wherever hosted. Further assume the sender knows nothing about said assistant,
but would be mortified if she did?

Google is the recipient's assistant and is compensated by being allowed to
show the recipient ads based on an automated analysis of his email's content.
How is an automated assistant materially different from a human one?

I don't see the problem.

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gibwell
Part of the argument is that the assistant doesn't actually have the consent
to use the contents of the email to show the recipient ads.

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mschuster91
I'm more comfortable with Google scanning my mails than the NSA or my
government...

Google is just using it for ads, but the government can construct whatever
paranoid stuff from my mails.

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rayiner
I feel exactly the opposite way. Companies are always looking for ways to
screw with ordinary people. Governments are mostly just interested in radicals
and terrorists.

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betterunix
The difference is that when Google screws you over, you see...advertisements,
maybe embarrassing ones, and maybe your personal data is given to some other
company. When your government screws you over you get a hand in your rectum
when you try to fly, or thrown in a prison cell, or have your home invaded by
a team of soldiers. Which scares you more?

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selmnoo
Why must you compare, and get in a game of "but _they 're worse_ than the
other"?

Both are bad. That said, I think the threat of civil liberties being taken
away by companies like Facebook and Google is very understated and very
underestimated.

And if I can give you a piece of my mind for a moment here, I am actually fine
with someone sticking a hand in my rectum in isolated instances. I think I
would actually be more bothered when Facebook decides to sell my private info
to credit card companies and insurance companies and I end up paying more for
insurance or whatever because of this.

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aptwebapps
> Why must you compare, and get in a game of "but they're worse than the
> other"?

Because betterunix was disagreeing with rayiner, who made the original
comparison.

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Mikeb85
This is absurd. How is Google 'intercepting' emails when Gmail is the service
from which they originate? Furthermore, Google's TOS seems pretty
straightforward.

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mschuster91
An outside party (e.g. a customer of an ISP) sending an e-mail to a company
which uses Google Apps Mail or a forward to a GMail account because the ISP
email interface sucks may not know at all that Google is involved.

So, the third party has no chance to be aware of Google's ToS...

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skj
The person they're sending it to could also publish it on the front page of
the New York Times.

This issue is about what the receiver wants to do with the email, so by using
gmail, or forwarding to gmail, the receiver is opting to have all his or her
mails scanned by Google for ad placement.

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mschuster91
It is, as a sender, my responsibility to not send information to people I
can't trust. So if I think the recipient may post a picture of my wiener on
the NYT front page, I should not do this.

However, if I do not know that the recipient uses Google Mail, it is not okay
that Google scans and potentially indexes my wiener...

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cynwoody
Where is it alleged that Google is doing that?

Did you find a picture of your wiener on Google Images? What search terms did
you use? Or did you take a quick snap and drop it on the camera icon in the
Google Image Search box?

I've not done the wiener experiment, but I do know that Google's ad placement
algorithms are fairly simple-minded. For instance, our CFO sent me a request
for a dump of some accounts off the accounting server. What ads did I see?
Dumpster rentals and local trash haulers!

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mattmcknight
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.

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.

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.

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.

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gibwell
The decisions are based on the purpose for which the interception was done.

Using the contents of people's email to support an arbitrary business model is
too broad according to the judge.

If we allow advertising as a legitimate reason to allow machines to read your
email, why not also allow Google to offer credit scores, insurance ratings, HR
evaluations, and services to private detectives?

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mattmcknight
I said- "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." None of your examples meet that criteria.

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corin_
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.

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mikeocool
Not to mention that most gmail users would probably be a little upset if gmail
search stopped working because google was no longer 'intercepting' their
emails to index the contents.

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peterkelly
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.

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
_have_ to (electronically) read your emails in order to deliver them to
recipients.

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judk
The phone company obviously has a right to transmit your calls, that doesn't
give them carte blanche to listen in.

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peterkelly
Can you define "listen in"?

There is software and hardware involved in encoding/decoding the analogue
signal, and compressing it for transmission across a digital network. That
involves automated processing, without which the system can't function.

I'm very much opposed to surveillance and other forms of privacy invasion, but
I think the discussion needs to be based on a clear understanding of the
nature of the processing involved, and the debate to be around which forms of
automatic processing fall into the "acceptable" and "unacceptable" category.

Examples of the latter, in my view, would include storing a copy of your
content for longer than necessary to transmit the call, doing speech-to-text
analysis and using the extracted words to build up a profile on the
caller/callee, and making the recorded information available to government
agencies for surveillance purposes or corporate entities for advertising
purposes.

"Listening in" is an insufficiently-defined term, which doesn't provide enough
information for us to have a proper debate about exactly what's going on.

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judk
Right, that's why I said "carte blanche". There are limits, not a simple 1-bit
binary distinction.

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judk
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.

Let's get the NSA before this judge next.

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electrichead
Why does Judge Koh seem to have it in for Google?

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ck2
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.

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gibwell
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.

Somehow I don't think we'd say that they haven't intercepted the email.

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cynwoody
Of course not. And they are doubtless doing something like that, because human
analysts could not possibly keep up. The idea is to build a huge haystack,
then go searching for needles in it, using as much automation as possible.

And, like any Gmail user, you did agree to their TOS? Well? Didn't you?

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judk
Where does the TOS mention indexing email to build an ad profile?

