51–60 of 78 posts
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.
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"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…
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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…
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…
1) Restitution for the injured parties. Hard to measure in a case like this, but you can essentially think of this as the digital equivalent of conversion (i.e. using someone else's property for personal profit without permission). So the fair restitution might be whatever dollar figure the person would have been willing to have been paid to have that information data mined.
2) Deterrence of harmful behavior. The proper measure for this should be (dollar amount of profit from choosing the harmful course of action) / (probability of getting caught). I.e. if you do something harmful and profit $10 million, and have a 10% chance of getting caught, then assessing restitution and punitive damages of $100 million makes taking the harmful course of action economically irrational.
An arbitrary cap, or a cap based on the price of the product, is not relevant to either measure.
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.
the exact same arguments could be applied to the NSA
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.
the exact same arguments could be applied to the NSA
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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…
Yeah, but it essentially always happened. You know those warranty cards you get with new products? They have always been used to build marketing databases.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/25/technology/do-you-really-n...
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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'm not sure at all that it is clear what the nature of that link is. I have no insight into the gmail's email relationship modeling but I suspect that it doesn't automatically build a relationship between david@gmail.com and other people that onion2k contacted. For one thing, it would be impractical to do this across all possible relationships -- there would be polynomial growth of the adjacency matrix with no information gain to justify it. Ask yourself, what does it mean that david contacted onion2k and onion2k, at some point in time, contacted alice, bob, and charlie? Unless you already know something nontrivial about these people, you assume they are independent.
I guess my point is that data analysis can be very costly; it is reason that humans have a hard time dealing with meaningful relationships spanning more than about 150 people[1]. Even a company with Google's resources would be overwhelmed if it had to store and take into account a large number of mostly (I mean, vastly mostly) meaningless relationships. At the least, it takes away resources from the relationship graphs that do matter and which are actionable, such as the graphs of spammers.
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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.
Many people sign NDA's. If you have an assistant read mails covered by the NDA, then the party who sent the mail can sue.
and so on and so on.
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…
Gmail is free to you, but their ads can earn more money by mining the info in your email. Is this really free here? Your email content has value.