Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the searches-for-justice dept.

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."

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Greed by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

    District Court Judge Lucy Koh can shut up, unless she really intended to give each and every of the 710 cases separate considerations and judgment.

    1. Re:Greed by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The damages per person would be de minimus. Trying to get around having to go the class action route by filing all these separate cases in one file may not fly.

      Maybe we need a start screen on every web browser that says "WARNING: NOTHING ON THE WEB IS GUARANTEED TO BE PRIVATE. LOSE ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE."

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    2. Re:Greed by chihowa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Privacy" is not a binary attribute and there are legally established reasonable expectations of privacy, even in public places (see the other story about FBI microphones overhearing private conversations at bus stops). It's not stupid to expect that your university email is private from unreasonable snooping by third parties and for purposes unrelated to to specific university policies. Just as talking about personal matters while you're walking in a park isn't stupid because spies with shotgun mikes could be hiding in the trees listening to you.

      The keyword in this conversation is "reasonable", which advertising companies stretch well beyond sanity with respect to privacy. It's not reasonable to expect that going to school at UC Berkeley means that Google gets unfettered access to all of your university email.

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
  2. Easiest case ever by Trachman · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Google clearly says that you get "free" email for a right to be analyzed, probed and offered products. Zero privacy, so to speak.

    Now, those educational accounts managed by Google are a slightly different animal. 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.

    Of course, the main irony of the original posting is the resentment of the court office for plaintiffs being cheapskates and paying only $400, rather than paying $28 thousand in filing fees.

  3. Re:Class action by bagofbeans · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Posted anonymously because I fear speaking

    Welcome to the surveillance state.