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Google sued for data-mining students' email

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Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#31

Post by mike-cardwell »

not_paul_graham wrote: post #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 dama…

Small companies can be sued into bankruptcy. Why should large companies be exempt?

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#32

Post by mgkimsal »

magicalist wrote: post #29
onion2k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be consenting for the email service to do reasonable processing on each individual email (eg filtering and preloading). Sending an email doesn't necessarily have to give the receiving agent permission to build a profile for the specific sender that maps all the emails they send to the service to multiple, separate recipients on to a single graph. Also, with Google's "Google Apps for Business", a user can us…

You can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.

"but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far."

There's nothing implied in sending an email beyond "I want you to read the contents". If there's more I want you to do, those wishes would be in the email itself.

30 years ago, if I wrote a paper letter to a company, I was not implying that I want them to build up a profile of me based on my stated info compared to the stated info of other people, where my letter came from, type of stationary, quality of my grammar, etc., then send me coupons that match the behavior they expect of people of my profile. I am implying that I want them to read my letter and take care of my request.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#33

Post by mattmanser »

Houshalter wrote: post #7

If you send an email to a gmail user of course you are consenting for their email service to process the email. Things like spam filtering and preloading images depend on this.

If you send a letter to an address of course you are consenting for the postman to read your mail.

This is all about moving from offline to online.

In the ancient days pre-email it was a non-trivial task to read every single letter being sent in a country, categorize them all and then profile people based on them.

And the countries that did that weren't somewhere you wanted to live.

In the modern age it's a "feature" that companies provide because "if you're not paying for it, you're the product".

Not that I think it's necessarily bad, but boundaries have to be set for this new age and this law suit is simply part of that process. Just look at it from a different perspective.

(And note that spam filters & image preloading are problems that only need to be solved because of the same new trivial cost of automated malicious actions)

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#34

Post by magicalist »

aDevilInMe wrote: post #26
dagw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I know whether someone is a gmail user or not when they're using their own domain?

You can check out the mx settings for the domain using one of the free online tools. If they have already sent you a message then you can look at the raw source of the email to see who and how it was sent.

It doesn't matter anyways. I might have a robot read every personal email I get to my entire household and I wouldn't need to disclose that to every person that sends me email.

I can forward all of them to a virtual personal assistant in Mumbai and have them deal with it all, just sending me a daily summary and maybe writing some auto-responses for me, and there'd be no need for me to disclose that fact to every person that writes me an email.

You can do the same thing with physical mail as well...there are services that can receive your mail, scan it, and send me stuff that seems relevant. No need for people to be able to figure out that you're doing that.

The fact is that I can contract that sort of thing out however I like. It's my mail once I receive it. I think it should be required for students to be protected when they have to use an email system when attending a school, so go ahead and get a firm statement from google on that, but the main part of this class action, the people sending email to people with gmail addresses, are barking up the wrong tree.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#35

Post by onion2k »

magicalist wrote: post #29
onion2k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be consenting for the email service to do reasonable processing on each individual email (eg filtering and preloading). Sending an email doesn't necessarily have to give the receiving agent permission to build a profile for the specific sender that maps all the emails they send to the service to multiple, separate recipients on to a single graph. Also, with Google's "Google Apps for Business", a user can us…

You can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.

I wouldn't argue that the recipient, eg the Google email account holder, has much claim on how Google profiles him. He has chosen to use Google's service. I'm talking about the sender.

For example I use onion2k@myemailprovider.com to send emails to alice@gmail.com, bob@gmail.com and charlie@gmail.com. Google now have a profile for onion2k@myemailprovider.com with a graph that includes nodes for alice@, bob@ and charlie@ and edges for the relationships between the four people, and links to anything we've discussed. If david@gmail.com then sends an email to onion2k@myemailprovider.com Google know that david@ has a second order link to alice@, bob@ and charlie@ despite the fact that they have never communicated or informed Google of this relationship, because Google have a profile based on onion2k@myemailprovider.com - an address that Google might not have a justifiable reason to be building a profile on.

Whether or not you believe that is a reasonable use of data is up to you. Some people think it's not.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#36

Post by magicalist »

mgkimsal wrote: post #32
magicalist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.

"but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far." There's nothing implied in sending an email beyond "I want you to read the contents". If there's more I want you to do, those wishes would be in the email itself. 30 years ago, if I wrote a paper letter to a company, I was not implying that I want them to build up a profile of me based on my stated info compared to the stated info of othe…

That wouldn't be a parallel situation. The parallel would be you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons that match the behavior they expect of people that get the kind of mail that you do. You may not like that trade, but fortunately you don't have to make it (or you can go get the business version).

Meanwhile, no, you have no right to dictate how I contract out how I handle my mail by sending me a letter. You gave me that letter, and you'd have a difficult time making a case even if I then proceeded to make thousands of physical copies of it and distributed it at a street corner.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#37

Post by cottonseed »

Houshalter wrote: post #7

If you send an email to a gmail user of course you are consenting for their email service to process the email. Things like spam filtering and preloading images depend on this.

For a long time I had used an email that forwarded to gmail. Nobody who used that email would know it was going to gmail. (I have mostly moved away from Google product since.)

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#38

Post by magicalist »

onion2k wrote: post #35
magicalist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.

I wouldn't argue that the recipient, eg the Google email account holder, has much claim on how Google profiles him. He has chosen to use Google's service. I'm talking about the sender . For example I use onion2k@myemailprovider.com to send emails to alice@gmail.com, bob@gmail.com and charlie@gmail.com. Google now have a profile for onion2k@myemailprovider.com with a graph that includes nodes for alice@, bob@ and char…

I don't understand. Any email provider can reconstruct that kind of relationship. What's special about Google in that case?

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#39

Post by facepalm »

What do they mean by "Google is reading our mail" - has Google reached sentience?

Just to display it on GMail, one of Google's servers has to read the mail. If they claim that Google has achieved sentience, the implications could be very far reaching...

I mean perhaps this lawsuit will clarify when algorithms will be considered sentient.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#40

Post by Oletros »

onion2k wrote: post #35
magicalist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.

I wouldn't argue that the recipient, eg the Google email account holder, has much claim on how Google profiles him. He has chosen to use Google's service. I'm talking about the sender . For example I use onion2k@myemailprovider.com to send emails to alice@gmail.com, bob@gmail.com and charlie@gmail.com. Google now have a profile for onion2k@myemailprovider.com with a graph that includes nodes for alice@, bob@ and char…

This is assuming that Google profiles onion2k@myemailprovider.com

But does Google profiles it?

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