Google: Cloud users have 'no legitimate expectation of privacy' A motion to dismiss filed by Google in a court case last month has offered some juicy quotes about the company's privacy policy, but legally it looks like the Chocolate Factory is in the clear. "Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who …
Google were always pretty clear (if you bothered to read the agreement before blindly agreeing to it) that the cost of the gmail service was that they would parse all of your email and use it to target advertising at you.
It has also always been clear that google is a us based company, and therefore beholden to us laws, and if you bothered to read up you would find that us law only applies to us citizens and non us citizens if they are located in the us. As such, the us laws which offer a right to privacy do not apply, and once your data has left your country and entered the us your own laws no longer apply to it either.
This information has always been available to anyone who ever signed up to gmail, so anyone who signed up has either decided they don't care, or blindly agreed to terms that they couldn't be bothered to take time to understand.
You can't provide an email service for free, the servers have to be paid for somehow... either indirectly through advertising, or directly via a subscription... some greedy providers may even use both methods. If you don't like the advertising model, find an email provider where you can pay for the service directly, or host a server yourself.
Now if Gmail or any other currently free email provider gave the option to pay an equivalent monthly fee for the email service in exchange for privacy, do you think these protesters would pay? It would be interesint to know how much revenue Google gets from the average user.
If people think a company can survive/thrive by giving its services away for free and still remain in business....I'd like to see them try.
If you use email to send a message, regardless of the email provider you have no more legitimate expectation of privacy than if you send a post card. Anyone with even the vaguest understanding of how the system works knows that if you want privacy you have to encrypt the message on the client side with strong encryption before sending it, and I'm pretty sure that's not an option with any webmail service (with a couple recently-shut-down services).
Here it comes...
More delusional idiots to trash talk Google.
Hey guys, if you don't like Gmail, DON"T USE IT! In fact, why don't you freetards go PAY for something that promises privacy instead of expecting a 'free' service to not make any money in any way possible.
Bunch of freaking loons. I swear!
I fail to see how my privacy is compromised by GMail in any way. Nobody (i.e., no person) reads my email and their algorithms don't report the contents of my email in any way to any person. Since the ads are hosted by Google, there's no possible route for any information about me to get back to the advertisers.
So seriously, please, what is the privacy concern?
Re the "recipient's assistant": If you send a letter to a busy law firm, you expect staff to open and sort mail. However, the staffer -- a Personal Assistant. (PA), Senior Administrative Assistant, or some such title -- is hired after a careful reference check, and keeps their position only if they sustain trust. That staffer trusted to view incoming mail, and type the lawyer's dictation for outgoing mail, is a far different situation than an arena of strangers, names unknown, who might run a third-party email client.
A law firm, health clinic, fund-raising charity, and many other organizations are bound by rules of confidentiality. That includes the handling of incoming and outgoing mail. Even low-level staffers must respect confidentiality, or the system would not work. So how can Google make the argument that Gmail should be no-holds-barred? With that, Google is treating customers as the enemy. When did that creep in? Google used to stand for "white hat" tactics all the way.
The 1979 Supreme Court precedent does not support Google. As another poster said, phone numbers shared with a telephone company are metadata (parallel to the address, return address, and cancelled stamp visible on an outer envelope). From that, you cannot extrapolate to sharing the content or words of a telephone conversation. Follow the link to the precedent, and read the actual ruling, which says:
<blockquote>Smith vs. Maryland, U.S. Supreme Court, 1979:
"The activity took the form of installing and using a pen register, which has limited capabilities. A pen register differs significantly from listening devices... for pen registers do not acquire the contents of communications.
"A law enforcement official could not even determine from the use of a pen register whether a communication existed. These devices do not hear sound. They disclose only the telephone numbers that have been dialled - a means of establishing (whether) communication (occurred). Neither the purport of any communication between the caller and the recipient of the call, their identities, nor whether the call was even completed is disclosed by pen registers."</blockquote>
It's difficult to imagine anyone doing serious business or sensitive correspondence who would ever use Cloud Services now or in the future. The whole concept of big data will have to undergo a complete change in architecture and security and the legal questions resolved to the users satisfaction before it will ever again receive serious consideration. The entire climate of surveillance and government access will force most of these transactions out of the hands of those mucking it up today.
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