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Google sued for data-mining students' email

nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#4
The plaintiffs are seeking payouts for millions of Gmail users. The financial damages would amount to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011.

So assuming at least 1 million users, they are seeking:

1,000,000 users * $100 per user * 365 days per year * 2 years = ~ $73 billion in damages.

I'm not commenting on whether data-mining on Google's part was right or wrong, but why isn't there any limit to the amount that companies can be sued for?

It seems impractical for the people suing to sue for around 73 billion dollars when the product/service is essentially free.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#6
Firstly the EULA (which nobody reads) does cover this and then the aspect of you get what you pay for and again their choice compeletely how they wish to spend thier money, or not in this case as it is a free service they are using.

Also the cusomised ad advertising is an option you can opt out of, so once again I'm not understanding the issue here beyond grabbing some headlines for mistakes that were avoidable on many levels.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#8
post #2

[deleted]

The virus argument is to online life as the terrorist argument is to offline life. Everybody useds it as a cover to get at you for their own purposes.

Recently, our glorious government here in Germany decided that there should be a new, secure way of online communication called De-Mail, implemented by the usual suspects (ISPs and the like).

Secure means end-to-end encryption, right?

Wrrronk! They encrypt the transport to and from the servers, but decrypt and reencrypt the data on the server, "to scan for viruses".

Because viruses are really the most pressing problem today.

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