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Google sued for data-mining students' email

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Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#71

Post by brightghost »

genericuser wrote: post #62
dagw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you believe that strongly that none of your personal emails should fall into the hands of Google, how is it silly to choose a school / job that will respect that belief? I realize for the majority of people who would simply 'rather Google not have their information' the trade off and the additional effort on their part are simply not worth it, My point is that everyone who is 'forced to use Google mail' is unconsc…

The public school you attend is not generally viewed as a free market decision as only certain members of society have the economic freedom to 'select' a different one, and public schools have legal obligations to protect the privacy of their students.

I imagine most people here are not working in K-12 education and so are not familiar with these issues, but it should be understood that many public school districts are making use of Google Apps for education in a capacity which is either explicitly or implicitly compulsory for students, including creation of private accounts on minor students' behalf.

If Google is not being entirely forthcoming on precisely what personally-identifiable information they are retaining about minor students they are potentially in a great legal mess here.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#72

Post by dalke »

svenkatesh wrote: post #70
dalke wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sout…

This is the full list of places where they're used: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/customers.ht... Most are universities.

That is "not the full list". That is a list of "customer stories", and certainly a subset of the full list.

In fact, it's the site I suggested you visit. Next, use the pull-down under "all types" to see that the three targets are "K12", "Organization", and "University".

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#73

Post by LammyL »

It is really interesting how people get so concerned when google "reads" their email to target ads at them, but they expect google to "read" their email to filter spam. The machine act of text processing of the email is same in both cases, yet only one is offensive to users.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#74

Post by mattmanser »

Houshalter wrote: post #43
mattmanser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You miss the point.

It's not that there's an assistant, it's that there's just one assistant reading everyone's mail, they can take all the tit bits to make a story and they've got a perfect memory.

This is one of the many differences between the new and old worlds, the sheer scope of the damage they could reap.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#75

Post by Zenst »

Oletros wrote: post #20
lumpygravy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. As far as I understood from previous coverage and reading the privacy policy, the point is that e-mails are mined even if ads are turned of for the domain. The resulting profiles are then used for showing contextual advert…

Do we have a proof that Google profiles non Gmail users? Take into account that process the email is not the same that profiling that user

May be based upon the assumption that if Facebook did it, then Google must also do it.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#76

Post by Houshalter »

belorn wrote: post #65
Houshalter wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but that seems pretty unreasonable. The assistant doesn't know that, and we can't ban assistants entirely because some people aren't responsible with their own mail. I'm not sure how common it is, and it's probably less so now with email, but I'd guess a lot of important people do have their assistants screen their confidential mail. For example, I know politicians often have people help with their mail.

Lets pull apart this analogy a bit more. A new cleaning company called CleanU create an app where people can easy order office cleaning by a single press of a button. In the ToS/service/liability contract on page 43, it says in legalize: "any document found by our assistants might be used to improve service and decrease costs" . This might sound as a great way to start a legit industry espionage service, but alas, it…

But this isn't a cleaning service. It should be reasonably expected that they automatically process your mail for spam filtering and image caching and other parts of the service. They are not using the service for espionage.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#77

Post by belorn »

Houshalter wrote: post #76
belorn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets pull apart this analogy a bit more. A new cleaning company called CleanU create an app where people can easy order office cleaning by a single press of a button. In the ToS/service/liability contract on page 43, it says in legalize: "any document found by our assistants might be used to improve service and decrease costs" . This might sound as a great way to start a legit industry espionage service, but alas, it…

But this isn't a cleaning service. It should be reasonably expected that they automatically process your mail for spam filtering and image caching and other parts of the service. They are not using the service for espionage.

And Gmail isn't sold as an advertisement service. The espionage for profit is not the same as filtering and image caching. That is the crossed line which this kind of lawsuit is asking about.

Cleaning services are also reasonably expected to clean desks. They might even temporary hold confidential documents in their hands while doing so. However, once they start reading the document and interpret them, a line has been crossed which no legal fine print can fix.

Re: Google sued for data-mining students' email

#78

Post by genericuser »

brightghost wrote: post #71
genericuser wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe that strongly that none of your personal emails should fall into the hands of Google, how is it silly to choose a school / job that will respect that belief? I realize for the majority of people who would simply 'rather Google not have their information' the trade off and the additional effort on their part are simply not worth it, My point is that everyone who is 'forced to use Google mail' is unconsc…

The public school you attend is not generally viewed as a free market decision as only certain members of society have the economic freedom to 'select' a different one, and public schools have legal obligations to protect the privacy of their students. I imagine most people here are not working in K-12 education and so are not familiar with these issues, but it should be understood that many public school districts a…

The public school your children attend is very much a decision as people commonly choose the location they live based on that. As evidence of this perceived quality of school district can be a major factor in property values.

As a minor many of your choices are of course left to your guardians, if as a minor you have a problem with their decision making then that's really an entirely different manner.

You are compromising saying 'its not worth finding a new place to live, possibly a new job, to avoid having my children use google' That is very much an analysis on your part.

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