Gmail data-mining lawsuits fail to get class action status Google has made its job of defeating a series of lawsuits over the privacy of its Gmail service much easier now that the judge has agreed that the cases can't be combined into a class action lawsuit. US District Judge Lucy Koh said that the claims from several sources that Gmail was scanning their messages to build up account …
Judge Koh,
Exactly when did Google buy you off? They HAD to pay you to do what you did.
I have never seen anything so stupid and ignorant, except in an Apple vs Samsung trial but you'd know about that wouldn't you?
Clue: NOBODY EVER GIVES PERMISSION to "intercept" an email. EVER!!!!! FOR ANY REASON, BITCH!!!!!
Even if that's the only choice on the menu, I do not give it to them.
That's what all the GMAIL users have in common! The emails were ALL literally raped by GOOGLE for contacts and information.
Google changed it's terms & conditions and never ACTIVELY told anyone they were being buttraped (in plain english) until it was too late. Who the fuck cares what language they used to tell them and when, you NEVER fuck with someones email. It's PRIVATE, dumbass.
I also do not consider any notification of a nefarious deed such as this to be legal in the sense of "warning", it's only an admission of guilt.
Judge Koh is quoted as saying: "The court finds that individual issues of consent are likely to predominate over any common issues, and that accordingly, class certification would be inappropriate."
Dear Judge, with respect, this is a mistake. Google only offers one set of terms and conditions for all of its email users; they are not personalised, nor made specific, nor adapted in any way regardless of age, sex, ability/disability, means of accessing the internet, or location within the US. Therefore I submit that a class action is entirely appropriate because there is no 'individual' element to the 'individual consent' to which you refer.
Additionally, Google in no way treats its users as individuals, and therefore cannot reasonably expect its legal issues to be treated individually.
What the judge found was that there are different categories of lawsuit, with differenr privacy policies being contested, and therefore it was not correct to have them all tried as one class-action. So far, so sensible.
But surely at that point the correct answer would be to have the cases as several class-actions eg one class-action for gmail users, one for business users, one for non-gmail users who sent/received email from gmail etc etc?
What 2+2=5 posted is essentially correct about the Google terms of service.
I work in a support environment where Google has been contracted to supply mail service which is paid for and ought to be confidential. Some services are or should be restricted by the contract. These contracts have been reviewed by lawyers on both sides for fitness of purpose to the stated business objective/mission. Furthermore, only some people whom the lawyers are advising are authorized to sign the agreements. Yet Google without fail send the same mass announcements about new services and same click through agreement forms to all our users. In fact, when we create a new account for a user, the very first thing they have to do is click Agree on the standard Google Agreement. If I could I would drop a frack ton of lawyers on Google just for us.
Be as pissed as you want, but make sure you have your facts right and put on your big-boy face or no one will take your whining seriously.
The point that Judge Koh was making, I believe, was that, while Gmail users had agreed to Google's Ts & Cs, NON-GMail-users who received messages from Gmail customers never had a chance to accept OR decline those Ts & Cs. Therefore, these are TWO different groups and can't be combined into one class.
"Even if that's the only choice on the menu, I do not give it to them."
Despite what you might want to believe, the Ts & Cs that you click that little box on that says "I agree to the Terms and Conditions of <NAME>." ARE a valid contract/agreement between Google and its users and that click-through means that you *DO* give them whatever those Ts & Cs say.
Also, despite what you may believe, if you don't like a company's Ts & Cs, your choices are either:
1 -- not to use the service, or;
2 -- to hold your nose and use it anyway -- and accept that there are things that you don't like, but that they are outweighed (in your estimation) by the parts of the service that you DO like enough to use it. Really, legally, there is no third option.
Actually, there IS a third option: You can argue that there has been a violation of LAW. That's what the courts rule on, not degree of butthurt. I don't believe that Judge Koh has said that the various suits may not go to trial, or even that the plaintiffs can't form discrete groups for purposes of taking Google to court -- Gmail users, non-users sending to/receiving from Gmail users, etc.; just that the categories of people claiming harm do not fall into one monolithic group ("class"), because not all had the same options available to them.
I'm not sure what "theft of services" you think Judge Koh is (allegedly) guilty of. From the article, it appears that she followed both the LETTER and the SPIRIT of the law, as a judge should. Now, the law may not be what you would LIKE it to be, but there you go.
Also, unless Larry Page and Sergei Brin came to every email user's house and physically assaulted them, then NO ONE was (per your original post) "literally raped" by Google. Whether they were FIGURATIVELY raped is left as an exercise for the student. (Personally, I prefer to reserve the use of the term "rape" to describe actual cases of... you know... RAPE, but clearly you have a different standard.)
Further, as others have noted, email should be considered to be a postcard, rather than a letter in an envelope. Bots are sent in clear and the postal workers along the way may or may not look at it. If you want your mail to be (more) private put it in an envelope (encrypt it) before you send it off.
...And "bitch"...? Please... this isn't Reddit. Grow up.
Finally, "its" is possessive, while "it's" is the contraction of "it is". Learn the difference.
Therein is the nub of the problem and an arguable issue which Judge Koh should have recognized as something that could be questioned in court.
Valid contracts, particularly in the US, are based on the idea that both parties can negotiate the contract. In other contexts the inability to negotiate the contract has been held to invalidate them as contracts. Most of the relevant law here relates to service warranties on equipment. Given that the typical user has no power to negotiate a different contract with Google (in my post above you'll note I have some issues on whether or not a "user" who has gone through the motions of negotiating a contract with Google has the power to negotiate a contract with Google), that should be an arguable point in court.
Frankly I'm tired of this canard. If what you sell on the internet or in a shrinkwrap package has no option for modifying the contract terms, it should not be recognized in court as a contract. Yes, it might upset the whole world of computing. But continuing to perpetuate an untruth as the basis of a legal system is dangerous to all of us.
Email is MAIL! You DONT read other peoples mail. It's a typical convention or practice, if not a law.
Google (or ANY other email provider), do not have permission or allowance to scrape emails regardless of obtuse and obfuscating T's and C's. Those same terms and conditions are being argued when the NSA does the same practice. Then WHY would it be okay for an email provider?
And fuck all you downvoters! Too bad you can't handle the truth!
I was thinking that folks should give Google what they ask for, something along the lines of 1,000,000 simultaneous small claims suits. To celebrate the googol (10^100), it seems the lawsuits should start at 10 am on the 100th day of the year so what is everyone doing April 10th?
If there are indeed different terms for google services based on the type of user then to seems googles problem actually got bigger as they could be faced with several different class actions on the same topic. One for schools, one for businesses, another for people who don't even have a gmail account. Each one of those groups is pretty big.
Spam filters don't collect any info from messages, don't associate them to a person, and don't deliver them to anybody. It's like an AV processing the files on your hard disk - you're ok with it - but if it would start to gather infomations from them about you and sending them to Google, would you be happy?
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