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Google sued for data-mining students' email

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Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#41

Post by Oletros »

magicalist wrote: post #36
mgkimsal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 r…

Google is not handling your mail, it is handling the receiver email

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#42

Post by onion2k »

magicalist wrote: post #38
onion2k wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google aren't special in this case. They're simply the one we know do data mining on email for their ad network, so they're the one we're talking about. If it came to light that other email providers who also run ad networks (or share data with ad networks) were doing the same thing then people would ask the same questions of them.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#43

Post by Houshalter »

mattmanser wrote: post #33
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"…

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

It's more like if the person you are sending to hires an assistant to sort and organize their mail for them (which people actually do.) You then go and sue the assistant.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#44

Post by plg »

prawn wrote: post #28
Tomdarkness wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Google Apps is when you create a new user the first time they log in they are presented with the T&Cs they have to agree to before they can use the account.

If this Apps for Education platform is targeted at children, are many unable to consent to terms perhaps?

also (1) children in school may have no choice but to agree, and (2) just because you agree to something in a contract doesn't necessarily mean it's enforceable. For example there are some rights you can't sign away in a contract.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#45

Post by svenkatesh »

prawn wrote: post #28
Tomdarkness wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Google Apps is when you create a new user the first time they log in they are presented with the T&Cs they have to agree to before they can use the account.

If this Apps for Education platform is targeted at children, are many unable to consent to terms perhaps?

Apps for Education targets Universities.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#46

Post by Houshalter »

dagw wrote: post #24
Houshalter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the option to opt out: don't use gmail. It's not a reasonable expectation that every single web service should be legally required to make every single feature opt-out-able.

It's kind of hard to do your job or complete your education without ever using your company or school email address. I suppose you could counter argue that you can opt out of going to university or working for a company the uses Google Apps, but that is starting to get kind of silly in my mind.

Then that is your company's problem, not Google. And that's not the argument I was making anyways.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#47

Post by thaumasiotes »

Oletros wrote: post #41
magicalist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Google is not handling your mail, it is handling the receiver email

You don't have any rights in a physical letter you send away. There would be no issue with the recipient engaging a service to handle letters that happen to be sent to them, and that service processing those letters however they saw fit, including by recording information about the sender(s).

I guess what I'm saying is... what's your point?

edit:

You appear to be misreading your parent comment. The parallel situation they describe is precisely that the recipient engages a company to process their mail (read the description: "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 [for] people who get the kind of mail that you do". All of that applies to receiving mail, not sending it.)

And this is precisely what's happening with Google: if you send mail to my gmail address, I've engaged Google to process it on my behalf. You have no say in the matter, nor can you.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#48

Post by thaumasiotes »

account99282 wrote: post #17

The suit maintains that, because such non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail users never signed on to Google's terms of services, they can never have given, in Google's terms, "implied consent" to scan their email. This. One victim is the private mailing list: There's always at least one sap who subscribes using google mail. My personal hope is that suits like this will one day push them to discontinue gmail.

But this is nonsense. The sender doesn't need to consent; the recipient has all the legal power over his mail. If I want to engage a company to keep files on all my paper mail, and all associated metadata, there's nothing you can do to stop me.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#49

Post by bowlofpetunias »

facepalm wrote: post #39

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.

It's interesting how corporations are only people when it's convenient.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#50

Post by dalke »

svenkatesh wrote: post #45
prawn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this Apps for Education platform is targeted at children, are many unable to consent to terms perhaps?

Apps for Education targets Universities.

Quoting from the article: "Apps for Education is used by K-12 schools and institutions of higher education throughout the world..."

Go to the Apps for Education page at Google, select "Customers", choose "K12" and it lists 10 primary and secondary education school systems as profiled "customer stories".

For example, "Saline Area Schools is a suburban/rural public school district of 5,450 students K-12 located in southeast Michigan, about 50 miles west of Detroit." ... "Encouraged by the success with faculty and staff, the Saline IT team will soon roll Google Apps out to their 3,200 students in grades 5-12."

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5AOHQcS-cAeODQ3MGVkNGEtNzJm...

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