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

Greed

[arth1]

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.

Re:Greed

[AthanasiusKircher]

The not-so-funny issue with this is that this is along the same lines as why a 2013 attempt to sue over the same issue failed. See the Washington Post's coverage of the current case from back in February of this year:

And a previous lawsuit, in 2013, alleged that Google was illegally scanning students' emails, mirroring the Berkeley students' claims.

But the earlier case -- which was filed in the same federal court -- was framed differently, as a class-action suit on behalf of virtually all users of Google's Apps for Education. It ended in 2014, when a federal judge declined to certify the class, ruling that -- because each school is responsible for its own privacy explanations and disclosures -- users at some universities might have consented to the scanning of their emails.

I haven't looked into the legal details of the previous case, but this seems again like an abuse of the court systems of late to refuse to certify class action suits for random reasons. If the WaPo description is accurate, what difference does it make in a lawsuit against Google what the universities told their students in privacy disclosures, etc.? The only facts should be what Google claimed, either to the public directly or to administration folks at these universities, about what their email should be used for. On the face of it, this seems a rather silly reason to disqualify a class action. (That is, unless they have proof that some students involved had actually signed a waiver from their university saying, "As a student here, you consent to having your email used by Google for commercial purposes." It seems really unlikely any university would ever make a student sign such a waiver, since it would probably be considered a significant FERPA violation.)

Anyhow, the present suit is restricted to one college, because Berkeley explicitly told students that their email wouldn't be scanned for advertising purposes. Again -- all of this seems irrelevant to a lawsuit against Google. If Google told university administrators that they WOULD scan email, and the university told students it WOULD NOT scan email, then the students should suing Berkeley instead of Google.

But if the situation was misrepresented both to the university AND to the students, and the students all were harmed in a similar fashion by the exact same mechanism, I can't see how it makes sense to force them all try separate cases here.

Re:Greed

[BarbaraHudson]

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."

Re: Greed

[arth1]

Please. Would you want to bother going through the legal process if you were to get nothing out of it while your government reaped the rewards and then wasted it on something stupid?

That would be like the bully at school stealing your lunch, so the school principal makes the parents buy you a new one but the principal gets to eat it.

No, it wouldn't. You would get reparations for the actual damages, which is your incentive. But not a smidgeon more. It would be like forcing the bully's parents to compensate you for every lunch that was stolen, plus an additional fine that neither you nor the headmaster gets[*], but is intended to make other potential school bullies think twice before stealing someone's lunch.

[*]: Typically, punitive fines go into trusts that allows courts to pay out actual damages to the grievants even when the ones who should pay are insolvent. Any excess would go to the government as a whole, just like taxes and other federal fines. In your example, it means that you would still be reimbursed your stolen lunches even if the bully's parents were destitute.

Re:Greed

[chihowa]

"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.

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.

Re:Class action

[bagofbeans]

Posted anonymously because I fear speaking

Welcome to the surveillance state.