Google Says Scanning Text Of Your Emails To Sell Ads Is Perfectly Legal

Google Says Scanning Text Of Your Emails To Sell Ads Is Perfectly Legal
idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com

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.

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.

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.