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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."
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.
How can it be both "anonymized" and persistently linked to your account at the same time?
which is totally what she said
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
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rewriting history since 2109
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); }
The companies supplying the ads are not given personal information ... it's not anonymous really, Google knows who you are.
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.
If it has only just been revealed to you that the free version of Gmail uses email to select targeted ads for the users, you don't belong here.
he wrote, just before passing out on the keyboard.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
But it is still anonymous in that sense that it works without identifying you to any human.
As time goes on, that distinction will become decreasingly relevant.
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.
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."
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).
As to the topic at hand, I find it interesting that the question isn't "Should google be targeting non-subscriber email ads", but whether or not they should be looking at ANY email content.
At what point does it become ok for any personal email regardless of 'sender' to be used for targeted ads based on content?
They explicitly say in their terms of service, since day 1, that they will serve ads based on your emails. If you don't like this, then you shouldn't have signed up for a gmail account.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
I believe it is from the advertisers viewpoint, possibly even from human knowledge within google. People picking keywords to target their adds can see that there are 500,000 people who have sent e-mails mentioning the phrase toe fungus in New york city, to target their anti fungal cream advertisements. None of those advertisers will know that John Smith who lives at X, that is the one who has that. Google employees most likely don't know that, depending on how their system is set up it could even be rigged so that humans themselves cannot figure it out (Yes the software may or may not have it, but it is possible to design the software to not actually allow the humans themselves to view this information). Of course beyond the source code to the entire system being given, we would have to take them entirely at their word as to whether or not it is indeed set up that way.
Mail in the real world belongs to the sender until it is sent and the recipient afterwards. Since the gmail user agreed to have his email crawled by google I do not see a case here. Same as if I show my friend a letter before I put it in the mailbox, or a letter I received and opened.a
What he is saying is that when you give something to someone you no longer have control over it.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
The sender is bound to no such thing, and does not need to be in order for Google to do this. The receiver is bound to it, and it is the receiver that has and owns the email after the sender has sent it.
Same as if you hire someone to read all of your incoming mail - the sender of the mail need not be aware/agree to it being read. There is novel here.
AccountKiller
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.
This would be the equivalent of your postman opening your mail stating that since you 'sent' it, it's no longer yours and therefore the United States Postal Service can just open and read it as it pleases.
not really, it's more like if you send a letter to a blind man, who has someone else open all his mail and read it to him. you never agreed to this other person reading the mail however, the blind man can grant authority to him to read it.
It doesn't matter what Google states in it's terms of use. Those are non-binding to a third party who signed no such agreement. The sender also has an expectation of privacy here.
they don't need to agree. the reciever of an e-mail is free to allow anyone they want to read it - without asking or even telling the sender. there's even a forward function in nearly every e-mail client/service. the only time this would be wrong is if the sender and reciever had an agreement that the contents of the e-mail were confidential and not to be shared with anyone - in this instance it could only be the reciever who has done wrong, not Google (as Google are a non-binding third party who signed no such agreement.)
The sender also has an expectation of privacy here.
which is not being breached.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig