No expectation of privacy, says Google

I spent yesterday afternoon in Judge Koh’s courtroom listening to arguments on whether or not the class action suit against Google based on their scanning of emails for advertising purposes can go forward. This is the case that made news a few weeks ago because Google stated in their brief that users have “no expectation of privacy” in using online services.
That does appear to be what Google is actually saying, based on the arguments by attorney Whitty Somvichian. He made it clear that Google considers everything that passes through their servers, including the content of emails, covered under “information provided to Google” in the privacy policy. Google is arguing that they can read, scan, and use that content to display ads and anything else they consider to be in the normal course of business.
I have pages and pages of notes but I have some paying work to finish before I can focus on writing up the case. There were multiple reporters and bloggers in the courtroom, but I’ve not found many article. Some I’ve found are:

This is an interesting case, though. The plaintiffs are asserting that Google scans and “reads” (electronically) every message that comes through their systems and that this is illegal interception. Google is stating that this is part of their normal business processes and vital for providing the Gmail service.
The judge had Google’s lawyer walk her through the different privacy policies submitted with the motion to dismiss. She wanted to know what specific phrases in the policies state that Google will be scanning information.
The defense lawyer asserted that Google tells users that any information “provided to Google” will be used, and that the content of emails sent to and from Gmail are part of the information “provided to Google.” This was a bit of a surprise to me, because I expect information I give to Google to be things like my phone number and recovery account addresses. I even expect the content of my docs stored on Google docs to be “information provided to Google.” But I never really expected the content of my emails to be part of that.
The plaintiff’s lawyer pointed out that the advertising is a “smokescreen” and that the real point of all of this is for Google to amass data about users and non-users. This data accumulation is not for the benefit of the users, it’s for the benefit of Google.
I’ll be going through my notes and the complaint this weekend and should have a more detailed post up early next week; I have some paying work to finish before I can focus on the case.
The judge scheduled a case management meeting for October 2 at which point they’re going to set a trial date. She does still have the option of granting Google’s motion, but I did not get the impression she was inclined to do that.

Related Posts

Spammers and Google+

I have a google+ account, but don’t check it very often. There seems to be a significant amount of noise on the feeds and trying to keep up with all the people who added me to circles was driving all the real mail out of my gmail inbox.
This morning I realized the noise just got louder. It seems spammers are buying very, very old lists scraped from usenet and inviting everyone on those lists to join them on Google+. Yup, an address of mine that has not been used in 7 or 8 years and is not very publicly associated with me got a Google+ invite from someone I’ve never heard of before.
I know there have been a lot of complaints about spammers abusing Google+. I thought it was possible, but I didn’t realize they were actually purchasing email lists to load into Google and spam people.

Read More

New EU directives

The EU has published consumer protection directives. Members states have 2 years to implement and enforce these directives.
The interesting bit is this:

Read More

Gmail says no expectation of privacy, kinda.

Consumer Watch put out a press release yesterday about a court filing made by Gmail that says Gmail users have no expectation of privacy. I pulled a bunch of the docs yesterday, but have had no real time to read or digest them.
For recap users everything I pulled (and stuff other people have pulled) are available at Archive.org.
The initial complaint was filed under seal at the request of Google. The redacted complaint doesn’t tell us a lot, but it’s available for people to read if they’re interested.
The doc everyone is talking about is Google’s Motion to Dismiss. Everyone is up in arms about Google saying, in that filing, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” (page 28, line 9). What no one seems to have mentioned is that this is actually a quote from a case that Google is referencing. The whole paragraph may lead one to a different conclusion.

Read More