Gmail and privacy lawsuit!
 

I ran across this article today which might interest some LQ members!

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-move-forward/

god i so hope google loses.

Probably only applies to US citizens - just like all the NSA kerfuffle.
Fsck the rest of the world ...

Many years ago when yahoo refused to let me access my accounts with them unless I agreed to their new " service agreement " I took a little time to read some of it!! I am not comfortable with " being owned " so I sought email alternatives and purchased fastmail accounts!! My yahoo accounts have probably been deleted by now; I still have gmail accounts but I never use them for personal email because of their ads policies!! Gmail is still free and the storage is great; but free means ownership to whoever touches any part of gmail!!

I use the mailbox my ISP gave me for private communication with my friends, and gmail for mailing lists. My Yahoo mailbox is used only when I need to give an email address to some organisation. If they want to send me spam, they can send it there. I never send anything from Yahoo.

I hope Google wins. I also hope that anyone using gmail for business is sued out of business by their clients for doing so -- though their clients ought to educate themselves enough not to send business email to Google in the first place.
I am completely sick of idiots using "free" internet things then complaining about how their privacy is being invaded when that's exactly what they signed up for.

If you can't see a product being sold, you are the product.

I am very confident now that "personal privacy" will become "the next big thing."

Of course there has been only one reason why Google ever offered "free mail," "free DNS servers," "free chat," and so on: they wanted to intercept, and analyze, everything. (It is widely believed that they generated massive amounts of "spam" in order to drive people to their service, which, mirabile dictu, was able to eliminate it.)

What's most interesting to me about this case is that the term, "wiretapping," is being mentioned. Google insists that it is their "ordinary course of business," and to them, it probably is.

However, most of us do not remember "party lines," in which one phone-line was shared with all your nosy, gossipy neighbors who weren't supposed to listen but who always did.

American law places a certain notion of privacy around telephone conversations, although once again it is widely suspected that cell-phone companies are using "Siri-like" technologies (which, after all, are not "p-e-o-p-l-e listening in ...").

Frankly, I think that people up to the present time really haven't been paying too much attention to issues of privacy, or of "it's really no one's business but yours." But I detect that sentiment growing very fast. People do not retaliate against the present-day utter invasion of their privacy, IMHO, only because they do not yet fully realize what is going on.

When they do, there will be hell to pay. It would behoove all of us, in our industry, to be extremely mindful of that.

I don't think people care. The number of people who look at you as if you're some kind of paranoid delusional moron when you tell them you don't have any social networking accounts tells me that most people don't want privacy.

I am sympathetic to the goals of the plaintiffs. I am no fan of Google's intrusiveness, but I must say this for Google:

Google does try to make its TOS clear. If persons don't read them, it's because other web "services" have made their TOS so obscure that attempting to read them without advice of counsel is a fool's errand, so persons are in the habit of just clicking through. Because of Google's relative clarity, I'm not sure that Google is the best test case.

I'm also not sure that persons don't care, as 273 says. Rather, I think that few persons realize the implications of running naked through the internet, nor how few data points are needed to identify an individual and, by implication, track his or her actions.

Just a few thoughts.

recently their ears are opening up.

I think some "older people" (a category in which I put myself) do notice but those of the current generation of young adults seem to relish being tracked and studied.


Edit: I do also want to point out that various news sources made it very clear that Google's TOS for email stated that all email would be read and the contents analysed to enable them to better target marketing to users. This was never, ever, a secret.

i don't know. late twenties onwards, in my experience, i noticed that they listen to my rants more attentively.
get that thinking look on their faces. maybe someone else told them before, and they dismissed it, but now... people are not stupid you know.

yes, you said it before.
the problem is, people don't see that.
they don't read the TOS (and who can blame them) and they are not alert to IT news (and who can blame them).
they are not computer people. the are just users - the majority.

personally (and i have said that before) i think there should be a precedence for "you cannot put anything you like into your TOS, then say: duh, you signed it, we own you!"
IANAL, but i think that is actually a legal thing.

and i hope someone will rip this wide open, this "i agree to the TOS" checkbox business, whether it's online or what.

In the UK, there is an "Unfair Contract Terms Act" that limits what a contract can impose on a signatory. Unfortunately it only applies to terms that exclude or restrict legal liability, not to other kinds of unreasonable demands. And I'm not sure how far national legislation of this sort can actually be applied to an offshore undertaking.

US law also generally nullifies "exculpatory clauses" that are found in contracts, and recognizes that a contract that is merely presented to someone (especially with no more than a "I Agree" button) was not necessarily actually "consented to" or even read.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter what your contract says if Law says otherwise. Hence, the use of wiretapping statutes would pre-empt anything their lawyers could create.

The general role of the host of an e-mail server (or a chat server and so-on) is generally that of a "common carrier," entrusted to carry things but not necessarily authorized to look at them. Google's terms-of-service might ... might(!) ... conceivably apply to a Google account-holder but certainly do not apply to any non-account holder with whom they might be communicating or vice-versa.

I think that you should fully expect this sort of thing to be the end of "free social media," and especially of indiscriminate corporate eavesdropping on communication. The tides, they are a' changin'.