890 College Students Sue Google Over Email Scanning (santacruzsentinel.com)

An anonymous reader quotes this report from Bay Area Newsgroup: Legal action against Google by four UC Berkeley students has ballooned into two lawsuits by 890 U.S. college students and alumni alleging the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent...making the same claim: that Google's Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes.... The suit by 710 students alleged that until April 2015, Google denied it was scanning students' emails for advertising purposes and misled schools into believing the emails were private.
The students' lawyers say each student is seeking a maximum of $10,000, while the U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh told the lawyer that "Our clerk's office is really unhappy you are circumventing our [$400 per case] filing fees by adding 710 cases under one case number."

Comments

Re:Easiest case ever

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a large University. Our contract allows for University faculty, staff and students to opt-out of google's data gathering. I think it should be opt-in, but it doesn't seem to be. If you opt-out, you are governed by a contract between Google and the University which bars google from performing data mining on your email, calendar and a few others. An opt-out account is not a full google account and is not part of many Google services like Youtube and Blogger. I have an opt-out account, and I never used the account prior to opting out. If Google did in fact data mine my information, that is a breach of the three-way agreement between the University, Google and me.

Re:Easiest case ever

[AthanasiusKircher]

That being said, if services are free I am sure google has a sentence, somewhere in the fine print, that allows them scan and analyze.

The issue is that at UC Berkeley (and a number of other colleges), students were explicitly told that their email would NOT be scanned for commercial purposes.

So, regardless of what Google did, there was some miscommunication here. If Google told college officials that they were scanning email, but the college told students they were NOT, then the students should be suing Berkeley instead of Google -- and this lawsuit should be dismissed.

But since this has gotten this far, I'm assuming this is NOT the case and that Google at some point misrepresented the situation to Berkeley administrators, as well as the students. If they had solid documentation that Google actively misled the college and supported these assertions that email would not be scanned... the "fine print" may not matter as much, even if it was buried there somewhere.