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Can Google Base Ads On E-mails Sent To Gmail Accounts?
concealment writes "A new lawsuit targets Google for reading e-mails to target ads, according to TechCrunch. But the issue isn't that Google is reading e-mails from registered users; rather, the company is using e-mails sent from other services to Google users to target ads as well. Google has gotten the side-eye a few times in the past for using e-mail content to serve context-based ads to its Gmail users. And for those Gmail users, Google's hide is covered: the terms of service explicitly state that users' e-mail content determines what ads they see."
Nothing to see here.
You talk better than you fool!
I knew there was an evil mega- corporation hiding in there.. catching bees with honey and what not.. free services.. ha! bait
I don't think this surprises anyone.
Also, it's not like your emails are pored over by a human, it's just a computer system.
The main issue would be what the computer system "learns" and then tags onto your profile, or if it is anonymised should someone get hold of this learning data.
Despite what disclaimer you may try to put on your email, when you send it, it belongs to the recipient. If they choose to let Google target ads based on it, that's their call.
The lawsuit is on behalf of "all persons in the province of British Columbia who have sent e-mail to a Gmail account" and demands statutory damages for breach of copyright of $500 per e-mail that Google has used for ads. The lawsuit also seeks an injunction against Google's use of e-mails going forward. Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
$500 per e-mail used for ads? Am I the only person that finds that to be just a tad bit insane?
Wayne Plimmer of British Columbia has filed a class-action lawsuit against Google for using his e-mails for ads. Plimmer is not a Gmail user, but his concern is that Google is reading and using his e-mails to serve ads to Gmail readers too. Being a non-Gmail user, he never agreed to the terms of service, so the legality of what Google is doing seems murky.
Okay. I can see that but can you explain how $500 per e-mail for everyone in BC is just about right for how much damages this has caused you?
My work here is dung.
Do intelligent people trust a company whose business plan is to sale your data to any company willing to pay.
Who owns your data?
All emails are property of the recipient. And Google has permission to read the email of its users. So it can read any email sent by anybody. In fact it might even have additional rights to enforce spam filters.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...and once they're in the account, the user agreement says they can be used to target ads to that user. The source of the emails is irrelevant.
I thought everyone who signed up for gmail from day 1, knew the entire point of the site was that they read your email. WTF?! Telling your thoughts to their ad-targeting bot, is what it's for !
Best practices for the last two decades have been that if you don't want potentially the entire world to have access to the contents of an email, you encrypt it. TFA doesn't say he did that. And then on top of that, even when you encrypt email, the recipient can always show it to anyone they want to, which just happens to be what happened here, where every gmail user agreed to automatically show all their email to Google.
People have been saying gmail is a bad idea, all along. That doesn't make it lawsuit-worthy, though. Just because you see "penis-severing scissors" for sale at the store, doesn't mean you're required to buy them and use them. If you do, live with the consequences instead of blaming the manufacturer for the scissors doing what they were plainly intended to do all along.
If non-gmail users have a problem with someone, it isn't Google; it's gmail's users. Those people are idiots and they, not the people who help them fuck themselves, are the problem. Sue the users. They are the ones who made the decision to sell you out.
Email protocols are unsecured, sensitive mails should be encrypted.
I'm gonna sue any anti-spam filter - because they ALL read the emails I've sent to other people who use them, without my permission, and may be targeting ads based on that.
And every antivirus software that integrates into Outlook.
And everything that might conceivably view the content of an email en-route (e.g. intermediate mail servers).
If the recipient chooses to use such software - that's up to them. If you send an email to them and they have agreed for Google to receive it on their behalf with their permission to read it, then that's not Google's problem.
It's like suing a courier firm that someone sent to your door to pick up a parcel, because they looked inside the package and the recipient that nominated the courier firm allowed them to.
huh - so thats why i keep seeing ads for cryptographic products and services.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Why should they be entitled to anything?
Well, I sympathize because the sender (not the recipient) never agreed to this e-mail introspection in any sort of ToS or anything with Google. And I feel like someone should be free to stand up their own e-mail server and have complete freedom from ads at some expense to themselves and some work if they so desire. That choice should always be there and it rubs me just a bit the wrong way that you can't do that if everyone else is using Google. Now, that said, I think in the end the ruling should go down something like this: tough shit. You can configure your e-mail server not to hand off any e-mails to Google servers or servers that would then route it to Google Mail. You want to run your own server, you implement your own security and white lists/black lists. You're basically acknowledging that the receiving server you are submitting data can do what they please with it (barring current laws like the CANSPAM Act, or whatever Canada has). So I think this needs to be sorted out and it needs to be determined whether this data and data analysis by Google is innocuous or if it is truly sensitive enough to be identified as, say, personal data and credit card numbers submitted to a site for ordering products.
They're also free to start their own ad-supported free email system, and if it is better than gmail (snicker snort) then they will surely have the same opportunity.
That logic doesn't follow. If I find out that someone is doing something morally reprehensible (though not illegal) and want a court to look into the situation, it's certainly not my desire to go around being a douche bag like them and trying to be a bigger jerk than them. This instance isn't a user complaining, it's a non-user complaining of a company's practices that he feels affects him.
Wake me up when gmail suppresses the ads in the email in some way other than not showing images by default (which it always informs you it's done.)
Again, it only informs the user of the system, not a sender who may be sending e-mails that are then inspected by Google algorithms.
My work here is dung.
I don't see a problem with this, Google makes no attempt to hide what they do and I greatly prefer to see deals on Linux Servers as opposed to Viagra in gmail.
Ok, you may be concerned about your privacy but as others noted: e-mail is not secure anyways, if you're important enough to have someone (as in a person, and not an algorithm) look at your email you should keep it encrypted anyway.
The recipient let Google read HIS email messages without his permission! He should sue everyone he sends emails to just in case they do the same.
he wrote, just before passing out on the keyboard.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I had a friend who googled a few things about childbirth out of curiosity, and then she got ads for all kinds of feminine hygiene/birth control products.
If I send an email to anyone, I assume that the email could become public. Whether it is because it is intercepted, someone hacks into the recipients inbox (or my sent items), the recipient's cat jumps on the keyboard and it gets forwarded to half the internet, whatever.
I also assume it might not be only the recipient reading it, no matter how many disclaimers I stick at the bottom. It could be read by the spouse, the child, the boss, the network administrator. Not only that, but there may be some court order meaning the email ends up in the public domain.
This lawsuit is just a bunch of people trying to get rich off Google's back. I signed up to Gmail knowing full well some machine would be scanning emails in and out to monetise it. It's a free service, they have to pay the bills somehow.
I have another concern with gmail, which is that it might be leaking ad information between gmail users.
By that I mean that if I'm corresponding with another gmail user, I get ads that are unrelated to anything we've discussed but which may be related to things that they are likely to have emailed or received emails about.
Just to give a trivial example, a friend has a pet. She has emailed me but never once mentioned the pet in email to me. I do not have any pets, nor have I mentioned them in my emails, but I now get ads for pet food. There are other examples that suggest my ads are based on my correspondents emails that weren't sent to me - that they are pulling in the ads based on both of our email histories.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I actually like that they do this, because you can disable ads with it. If you receive an email at gmail that contains anything "Bad" such as "My mom died last night" then Google disables ads when you view that email. Try it. Long ago I added the string "my dog got hit by a car" to my email sig, in white text so it doesn't show up, as a favor to friends on gmail who get mail from me. They never have to look at ads while reading my emails.
Personally, I feel it's ok for people to drive cars even if they don't know how to change a spark plug. But that doesn't mean they have a right to use government to initiate force against others whenever their unreasonable expectation of how engines work, happens to be violated. If someone sues Ford (or worse, a spark plug manufacturer) based on the idea "I didn't know this car used electricity! I thought I was buying a petroleum-powered car!" then maybe that person should be banned for life from doing anything involving a car.
Hopefully Google will try to get a judgement along those lines, so that we can eliminate people like this truly worthless piece of shit who never bothered to take three seconds to think about how email works. (Hint: it involves other people's computers, some of them doing things on their behalf, not yours.) Why would anyone want to ever receive an email from someone with that combination of arrogance and ignorance? The world won't miss him.
I hate advertising. I liked this quote from Banksy, a UK artist:
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
I have never seen ads in my inbox. Apparently, evil google hasn't found a way to hijack imap.
They can target ads all they want, because I won't see them anyway. They won't even get pageview statistics, since I'm not using their obnoxious webmail interface. MWAHAHAHA!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
YES THEY CAN!
Maybe they should not, or they might not. But surely they can.
It's a matter or power and grammar.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
It boils down to one question: Can I legally delegate reading and sorting my e-mail to my secretary/receptionist/administrative-assistant/etc.? That involves exactly the same situation, a third party reading the e-mail with the consent of the recipient. If it's legal, then Plimmer has no basis for his suit. There's a lot of basis for saying the networks and servers carrying the e-mail between the sender and the recipient can't go reading it, but there's not a lot of law restricting what the recipient can do or have done to/with mail and e-mail once they've received it. If you don't want the recipient letting others see the mail, you're going to have to have an agreement in place with them beforehand about that and your only recourse if they spread the mail around anyway will be against them for breach of that agreement. You won't have any recourse against any of the people they gave the mail to, because those people have no duty to you to not look at the recipient's mail (note: the recipient's mail, not yours, it ceased to be yours when you handed it over to the recipient).
google doesn't understand what information is actually in the email! "google" doesn't read the way humans "read" email. some google server turns email into a feature vector (set of numbers without meaning). some other server predicts the best ad from the feature vector. there is a feedback loop, when you click on an ad, the system learns which ads are best to display. no employees at google actually reads the user's email. the initial data for making prediction is taken from other sources. the advertiser has no access gmail users' information. with 500 million users sending 100s messages through an automated system, there are bound to be cases where ads seem creepy. no google employee can tell you why their complex system acts creepy because the feedback loop means there is data affecting the prediction that no google employee has created or can understand.
google does make money from content generated by other people. some of those people would like to be paid for the benefit they provide to google. but they are a drop in the ocean of information, google doesn't need them. In a way google does pay for that content by offering its services for free. even the ads are priced on their value to advertiser.
in the end, google is far from perfect but their benefits clearly outweigh their "evilness" unless you produce that tiny drop of information. that is life. sue because it is like buying a lottery ticket.
If you get bored reset any local dns caching services and close your browser.
Fire up wireshark and type 'dns' into the filter box to show only DNS queries.
Next fire up your browser and visit any single site..simply loading the sites home page is normally more than enough. Any of the news media sites, abc, nbc, cbs, fox, forbes, slashdot, nasa..whatever it hardly matters.
I was blown away... I knew there were tracking networks but I did not know it was this bad with soo many firms involved when you make even a single request to a site. If your really bored count the the number of DNS names referenced for which robots.txt has been explicitly configured to deny indexing requests according to google.
Not that this is necessary, but;
gpg -c filename
#Enter passwd, upload, send. However, just be sure to occasionally send large chunks of random copy/pasted nonsense too. You could set up a crontab to send strange output to a specific text file, and use it as a base for all your "confuse" mails. Occasionally I copy/paste large bodies of text, run them through a weak substitution cipher, then email them.
- Making Hal stupid, one email at a time.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
mail.google.com/mail/h
Problem solved.
...for all Gmail emails that prevents Google from reading any and all emails? Google already transmits email using HTTPS so that gives some kind of security between sender to Google's servers and from the servers to the receiver, but the mail needs to be encrypted at the sender's and receiver's sites with code and keys Google can't guess. I'm not sure about when one uses a non-browser email reader. Suggestions, anyone?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
How about stop using Gmail? Seriously you think you are entitled to a right to privacy by volunteering to use Gmail? If you really care about the content of your email, set up your own email server.
You can't opt to use someone's services and then dictate how those services should be offered, it goes the other way around.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
By the same logic used to sue Google, spammers would now be entitled to damages from every anti-spam service and device in the world. At $500 per email, that's one hell of a payoff for those bastards.
-Lod
People on slashdot need to realize that in general, they make way too big a deal about ads, and their views are certainly not shared by the general public, nor are they with the whole slashdot audience
I don't give a crap about ads, as long as they are unintrusive and let me keep working. The whole by-line of "Advertisers can't control my eyeballs or ears." is bull-crap to me, because personally I consider myself a bit more intelligent than the average monkey, and I am pretty sure that advertising does not impact my purchasing process in any way whatsoever.
While watching television the other night, I was subjected to a commercial for kitty litter. After a moment's thought, I realized I have never seen such an ad online. In fact, on the rare occasion that I actually notice ads online, they tend to be for goods and/or services that are, in fact, of interest to me.
Personally, I'm pretty okay with targeted ads. But then, I don't give a rat's ass whether anybody reads my email.
In all honesty, once I was having an email exchange with a mechanic that charged me too much money for not enough work. Gmail stuck an ad up for a much better mechanic.
No, I will not work for your startup
You don't think advertising impacts your purchasing process in any way whatsoever? I think you are underestimating the effectiveness and pervasiveness of marketing, my friend.
You've NEVER decided to see a movie based on a trailer? You've NEVER thought about a product that you heard about on the radio or saw on TV? You've NEVER seen an advertisement for a restaurant and thought, "Mmmm, that looks good."?
As Banksy's quote points out, the effects of advertising are subtle. Most of us are willing to live with the ads, because they often pay for other products or services that we want, but saying that advertising doesn't impact oneself seems a bit much.
I have always been surprised that people accept that services like hotmail and many others take the liberty to add advertisements on outgoing mails, without the senders knowledge. When you send a mail from a hotmail (or gmx etc) account, you actually don't know the exact content of the mail you are sending. The recipient will be spammed with an ad, which you have never seen and of course, not explicitly allowed.
I find this incredibly rude and totally inacceptable.
Google, on the other hand, sends your mails out as you have written them, and doesn't add anything to them. As a Gmail user, you get ads in the mail interface, but you don't spam your correspondents. I consider this perfectly acceptable. If I don't like it, I don't use gmail. And Google's robots read my mail to traget the ads. They were also the first to aknowledge this, and state it clearly when I signed up for a gmail account. If you open a hotmail account, do you clearly see that they will add spam to all your outgoing email? Has anyone considered suing them?
(And of course, ther is the milder version of the iPhone, preconfigured to add the ridiculous "Sent from my iPhone" to outgoing mails. Which new users don't know about. And don't know how to turn off. (it's a pre-configured signature)).
People on slashdot need to realize that in general, they make way too big a deal about ads
Fuck you. Watch some (European, no idea how it was in the States) sports footage from 50 years ago, watch photo's of villages and cities, watch photo's of traffic, and then look outside. The world is fucking plastered in advertisements. And those boards at the sports games? Serious money has been spend on research of the eye and the brain so they can design the boards so your eyes will be attracted by them, you actually have to condition yourself to look away to be truly able to follow the game in all its intricacies and even then you likely will memorize what they want you to memorize. I can't recall anything I got for my birthday as a child, but I have fucking ad tunes from that era hardwired into me. I remember brands and accompanying tunes which have been of the market for decades.
Not a big enough deal is being made about ads. All hail Bill Hicks: If you work in marketing: KILL YOURSELF!
I consider myself a bit more intelligent than the average monkey, I am pretty sure that advertising does not impact my purchasing process in any way whatsoever.
My my, aren't we the uppity arrogant one. No sirree bob, my superior genes will ward of any form of trickery designed for a plebeian mind.
Seriously, cockpunch yourself a few times, you seem a dick.
E-mail by default was never designed to be secure! Anyone can read it while in transit. Encrypt the message if it is confidential.
All someone would have to do is slap a ToS on the e-mail receiving relay stating that by accessing this server you agree to allow anyone to read the contents.
E-mail standards simply don't provide any guarantee of delivery or security. It is best effort.
Just put big ugly banners all around the site.
You're being foolish. An unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model and cannot last. It's no accident that almost every single new advertising venue gradually gradually increases advertising load until the net benefit of the venue to the consumer is just marginally above zero.
And please, no nonsense about unsolicited advertising being beneficial to the consumer. The cost/benefit isn't even close.
I've never seen ads or spam added to my incoming emails, nor from gmail, nor anywhere else.
Are you sure it's not an issue on your end?
Hey, I didn't force you to block ads or anything. The discussion happened to be about ads, so I chimed in. View all the ads you want, as long as I can reasonably avoid them.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs