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Judge Orders Deleted Emails Turned Over

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that-is-a-lot-of-mash-letters dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "In a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, a subpoena sent to Google orders the turnover of the complete contents of a Gmail account, including deleted e-mail messages. The Judge has granted the subpoena and orders that all e-mail messages, including deleted messages, be divulged. Google's privacy policy says deleted e-mail messages 'may remain in our offline backup systems' in perpetuity. It does not guarantee that backups are ever deleted. So much for the Delete Forever button."

12 of 600 comments (clear)

  1. Hate to say 'I told you so', but... by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I TOLD YOU SO.

    I've maintained before that Google retains far too much information to make the use of Gmail anything less than a full-blown privacy nightmare. (For more information, please look here and here.)

    And now, the chickens have come home to roost. From TFA:
    The subpoena asks for not only current e-mail but also deleted e-mail: "All documents concerning all Gmail accounts of Baker...for the period from Jan. 1, 2003, to present, including but not limited to all e-mails and messages stored in all mailboxes, folders, in-boxes, sent items and deleted items, and all links to related Web pages contained in such e-mail messages."
    A stunning victory for the Establishment and a horror show for private citizens everywhere. Welcome to 1984.

    And before you start, please don't object that the person affected is a defendant in a criminal proceeding, because that's quite beside the point. The point is that Google has this information on you, and will hand it over upon request. This vindicates the caterwauling of all the privacy advocates concerning Google and Gmail, and establishes a dangerous legal precedent. Remember, as our 'inalienable' rights are systematically stripped away by the architects of the New World Order, more and more of the things you do become 'illegal'...and subject to criminal persecution...er...prosecution. It might not be long before you are being referred to as 'defendant'...what will you think of your Gmail account then?
    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Hate to say 'I told you so', but... by MyNymWasTaken · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you're concerned about your privacy, why are you sending sensitive information in the clear over email; through any provider?

      Use PGP!

      And would you mind telling me how gmail is any different than hotmail or yahoo mail in regards to managent's access to email contents?

      what will you think of your Gmail account then?

      "I refuse to divulge my PGP private key & passphrase."

    2. Re:Hate to say 'I told you so', but... by malchus842 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This is why I'm my own ISP (so to speak). I run my own server, and do my own backups, which I retain ONLY for disaster recovery purposes. The system is backed-up each nite, with the backup files copied to another system. After 3 days, the backups are expunged with a secure erase program. It's all automated. It never hits tape, and as such, if I delete something, it's gone.

      I also religiously encrypt outbound email, and ask my correspondants to encrypt mail they send to me.

      Now, don't get me wrong - I don't think this is 100% secure, but it sure beats letting Google/Comcast/AT&T/Earthlink/MSN or whoever determine what gets kept and what doesn't.

      I would never change back - come what may, as long as owning a server is legal, that's how I'm getting my email. And if they try to make it illegal, well, Jefferson told us how to deal with that problem.

    3. Re:Hate to say 'I told you so', but... by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was in full agreement up until: "...much less analyze it in any form"

      If I were a spook I would not want to figure out every message coursing through the interwebs, I would be more interested in tracking who is talking to whom. That way when I decide to piss all over peoples privacy I could seize and decrypt the accounts of the evil-doers and all their mates at slashdot. - The eternal problem that is easy to spot, is who decides what constitues evil? Are there non-binary levels of "evil", and if so what are they?

      OTOH: This kind of social network monitoring and analysis has dismantled extremly vile networks involving child tourtue and sexual abuse of toddlers. Most notably in the mid 90's in Denmark where some very high profile Danes were implicated in an international child abuse network. The result in Denmark was public revultion with thousands of people attending mass protests.

      How many people would peacfully tolerate privacy protection for that kind of activity sent over a global public network for profit? Should we refuse to employ bomb sniffing dogs to monitor snail mail because the dog might pick on an innocent package?

      From anarchists all the way across the political spectrum to 1984, the spanish inquisition and the crucifiction of Christ, every one of us looks for nirvana in a personal "book of rules", this "nirvana rule book" only exists within the deluded individual's mind. The fact that "nirvana for all" can not be discovered through a single "book of rules" does not slow humanities enthusiaim for writing "rule books" and forcefully applying varying interpretations on to everyone they encounter. I'm not saying human nature is wrong, it just "is".

      BTW: "1984" is a brilliantly insightfull book, "Animal Farm" is equally as brilliant and in my mind closer to the "truth" about ourselves.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  2. The Government Hates Google by taylor_venable · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With everything that's been going on lately, it sounds like the American government really wants to take Google down in the war of public opinion. The gov't just keeps trying to make them look worse and worse. And since the American courts typically just allow the gov't to do whatever it wants, they're winning.

  3. U R pwned. by Bob+Cat+-+NYMPHS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hey, I happen to know YOUR company does backups! You deleted your mail from the server, but you didn't hunt down those tapes in the vault, did you? Huh?

    Does NO ONE remember Ollie North and the White House PROFS system? 20 years later, and people still think incriminating data will always just go away when you desire.

    INFORMATION WANTS TO BE COPIED.

    --
    The latest Slashdot meme.
  4. Please !!!! by powerlord · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Someone think of the poor people that will have to read through all the spam that goes through one mailbox!!!

    Heck ... I can picture the defense getting a 80GB archive tape and being told that was all messages recieved. Yes, 99.999% of them are spam. Enjoy.

    Talk about burying the opposition in paperwork.

    --
    This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
  5. how appropriate! by corbettw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Considering my first meeting today was regarding how best to redesign the mail system to make it easier to comply withsubpoenas in the future. Step one of that redesign: turn off the backups!

    Just more proof that the 'e' in email doesn't stand for 'electronic', it's 'evidence'.

    --
    God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  6. Retention of data - just curious by sceptre1067 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anybody use voice mail provided to them from their cell phone or landline phone provider?

    Where is that data stored?

    Has any telco been ordered by a court to turn over that voice data?

    Just curious...

    1. Re:Retention of data - just curious by MrNougat · · Score: 3, Interesting

      At a former employer, we moved from a PBX phone system to a VoIP (internal) phone system. In the VoIP system, voicemails were saved as .WAV files to a voice server, and also emailed to the recipient.

      The company I worked for had come under subpoena in the past, and a lot of effort was expended to retrieve the data the subpoena requested. With the PBX, once a voicemail is deleted, it was gone. Not so with the VoIP system - voicemails would be found on the phone server, on mail servers, on workstation email client cache, and anywhere that end users decided to save the WAV files - and any backup tapes for the above. If another subpoena occurred, we may have been responsible to discover, transcribe and deliver information about voicemails going back to the beginning of the VoIP system.

      That would be horrendously expensive. In order to circumvent this, investment was made in a third party system that would strip voicemail files out of everything. They wouldn't be backed up to tape they would be deleted from any system after some time period (30 days?). That way, we could state such in our data retention policy, and any subpoena including voicemails would only go back 30 days, and not forever.

      If you don't have the data, and are destroying it in accordance with a data retention policy, it can't be subpoenaed.

      I know this is all somewhat tangential to your question, but I figured you might find it interesting.

      --
      Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
  7. What privacy? by frinkacheese · · Score: 5, Interesting


    Look folks.. Privacy simply does not exist. You'll get your search terms read, email copied, if you encrypt you have to give over the keys and if you don't then you get put into prison anyway.

    Your phone will be tapped, mobile will be tracked, cars followed with "traffic enforcement cameras". Your DNA will be on file, biometrics saved and your Underground trips logged.

    Everywhere you go there are CCTV cameras, face recognition. Your purchases are tracked with credit cards, store loyalty cards and RFID tags. Your bank transactions are flagged if they look interesting and the tax people peer into your account looking for money that suddenly appears.

    1984 got here, oh, 22 years ago now...

  8. Re:You're Not Wrong, BUT... by Hollins · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Like any responsible data company, they don't want you to lose important data... so they back it up. Independently. Into offline storage. And when you click the "delete forever" button, your message is not magically removed from media that is not connected to the system.

    I'm not buying it. Here's a way to test your theory. Delete an email message with a large pdf attachment. Wait a few days and contact Google. Tell them you had a hard drive failure and a message you deleted contained the only copy of your Ph.D. thesis. Beg, plead, cajole. Offer them anything.

    I'll bet you a beer you won't get the message back. Google's long-term data retention policies have nothing to do with altruistic measures to protect users from data loss.