Anti Gmail data-mining lawsuit hits possible stumbling block A US judge has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works of a lawsuit brought against Google for allegedly improperly mining data from emails for profit. Judge Lucy Koh said in a hearing yesterday that the suit may be tough to pursue as a class action case, which allows plaintiffs to sue in a group and gives them a shot at a much …
"the identity of any non-Gmail users can only be found out if someone goes through all the non-Gmail users whose addresses are on file in its systems and then sifts through the responses"
That's a really difficult job. If only some big search engine company had some sort of toolset for processing large log volumes ... maybe they could call it Google Sawzall, like Google did when they created it over a decade ago?
I'm not too convinced of the case's merits, but the idea Google of all people can't process their own logfiles to find the names in question?!
"Google has argued that the identity of any non-Gmail users can only be found out if someone goes through all the non-Gmail users whose addresses are on file in its systems and then sifts through the responses - a Sisyphean task that would be totally unworkable."
You didn't include the whole text.
To your point... yes Google can do it as can anyone who has a large enough cluster of machines.
You can even run a k means clustering algo to see patterns of who talks with who. Both internal and external to Google's Gmail services.
As to the case's merits, it has enough to go forward.
Its going to be interesting because of the edu addresses.
If Google didn't harvest info from the EDU group... then their practice of spying on everyone would be saved until another lawsuit.
"A US judge has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works of a lawsuit brought against Google for allegedly improperly mining data from emails for profit"
Isn't this exactly what all the email providers do, trawl through your email and feed the results to the advertisers. It would be interesting to find out who is behind this lawsuit ?
> A class action wouldn't seem to make sense from a user perspective, the actual value of one individual's data is going to be a few measly Dollars at best and simply not worth the time.
Perhaps it's not about the money, perhaps it's about the principle of "My emails with <some other person> are between me and <that other person>, not the whole wide world, and not Google's money machine". I don't use gmail - but other people do. I have not at any time consented to have Google scan emails, but since other people have, then that apparently means it's OK to do ?
I have to admit, at times it is tempting to blacklist gmail and just return an error message suggesting the person contact me from an email account hosted with someone who doesn't consider me as a product to be sold.
"Isn't this exactly what all the email providers do, trawl through your email and feed the results to the advertisers."
No. My email is "private" in that it runs through mailservers that I pay for. I don't want advertising profiles built up and I most emphatically do not consent to my private emails being read or scanned.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
