Judge Rejects Google Deal Over Email Scanning (fortune.com)

A federal judge in San Francisco slammed a legal settlement that proposed to pay $2.2 million to lawyers, but nothing to consumers who had the contents of their email scanned by Google without their knowledge or permission. From a report: In a 6-page order, Judge Lucy Koh told Google and class action attorneys the proposed settlement was insufficient, in part because it failed to clearly tell consumers what the search giant had done. "This notice is difficult to understand and does not clearly disclose the fact that Google intercepts, scans and analyzes the content of emails sent by non-Gmail users to Gmail users for the purpose of creating user profiles of the Gmail users to create targeted advertising for the Gmail users," Koh wrote.

Comments

Lawyers get rich...

[torkus]

...and only the lawyers get rich. When will people learn?

Heck, they got themselves a pay day and didn't even get a clear ANSWER for the consumers.

Re:Lawyers get rich...

[ET3D]

Well, they don't get the money yet. They'd get rich in the end, sure, but at least consumers might get something too, thanks to this judge.

Re:Lawyers get rich...

[Martin Blank]

Consumers are going to get, at best, a notice at the top of their Gmail login with information about the settlement and a reiteration of what almost all of them already knew: Google looks for keywords and alters its advertising accordingly. They're not going to get a payout, or even a coupon or discount code good for purchase of Google products.

The lawsuit was someone looking for a payout, and the settlement is Google trying to get out of it as cheaply as possible. As torkus said, the lawyers are the winners here. For everyone else, life just goes on.

Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[barc0001]

Oh, GMail is free? Hmmm...

This is a horseshit waste of money and legal resources to enrich lawyers. Even before I signed up for GMail in beta (yes that long ago) it was well known that GMail was using the contents of mail to display targeted ads. That's why it was being offered as a service. It's in the TOS.

Sorry to hear "consumers" who got a service for free are too damn stupid to realize how it's being paid for. Just wait till someone tells them how Facebook pays for itself...

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear "consumers"

I'm old enough to remember when I was called a customer.

That's all passe now I guess.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[Mikkeles]

FTFS (emphasis added):

This notice is difficult to understand and does not clearly disclose the fact that Google intercepts, scans and analyzes the content of emails sent by non-Gmail users to Gmail users...

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[barc0001]

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

"With features like Priority Inbox, we automatically process your messages to help you sort through the unimportant messages that get in your way. We use a similar approach with ads. For example, if you’ve recently received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, a deal from a local camera store might be interesting. On the other hand, if you’ve reported these messages as spam, you probably don’t want to see such a deal.... The process by which ads are shown in Gmail is fully automated. Nobody reads your emails in order to show you ads."

Seems pretty clear to me.

> emails sent by non-Gmail users

So, people sign up for Gmail and never expect to get email from anyone outside of other Gmail accounts? What exactly do they think an email account is for?

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[barc0001]

customer
kstmr/Submit
noun
1.
a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business.

You paid how much for that Gmail account again? $0?

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[gweihir]

You forgot that this is about people sending email to Gmail users, not about the Gmail users. The latter accepted this in the TOU. The former did not.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[barc0001]

Oh, you mean the message they transmitted across a public network in plaintext that might cross multiple countries' boundaries before arriving at the Gmail MX server farm? I can see how security minded they are.

When you send an email you have no control over what the recipient will do with it, arguing that you didn't accept the TOS of the recipient's mail system is asinine. What about sending mail to people at corporations, do you "accept" their mail retention and scanning policies before sending as well?

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[gweihir]

You have apparently no clue what you are talking about. First, TLS can be used with SMTP. Second, snooping on Internet backbones is actually pretty hard to do. Third, the target ISP is harvesting _their_ messages without ever getting _their_ consent, and that happens to be illegal.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[guruevi]

I didn't yet get into the details of the story, but I think this is the lawsuit that started a few years ago where people having a contract and paying for Gmail (eg. business and education) were promised they weren't going to be scanned yet Google continued scanning them regardless. This was quite a kerfuffle for a few Universities a few years back.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[torkus]

If you're getting something for free then you're probably the product, not the consumer.

Ladies night at the bar? No, you aren't drinking for free. You're the product being sold to the men.

Free email? No, you aren't getting a service that millions are spent to develop and run for free. You're the product being sold to the advertisers, data conglomerates, and so on.

So, in reality you have a very distinct, real-money recurring value. You may not be able to personally realize direct monetary income from it, but you're certainly giving 'it' to google to sell.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[zlives]

the article says all non-gmail to gmail email is scanned. does that include email sent from google apps (paid) accounts? also what about PFI info especially medical info?

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[barc0001]

TLS is not yet required for traffic and while it's made great strides in adoption, that is a very recent development. As of two years ago, Google themselves claimed half of received SMTP traffic was in plaintext, and only in January of this year did traffic cross the 80% threshold. When Gmail was created almost all of it was plaintext.

2014
https://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2014/06/transparency-report-protecting-emails.html

Now
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/

>Second, snooping on Internet backbones is actually pretty hard to do.

Unless you work for an alphabet agency. Or one of their contractors. Or one of the people who has the jewels of the backdoors the alphabet agencies put into backbone equipment surreptitiously:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

> Third, the target ISP is harvesting _their_ messages without ever getting _their_ consent, and that happens to be illegal.

The target 'ISP' can also easily be corporations when you send mail to them - as many run their own IT operations - and they can and will do whatever they like with them. Plus, do link to the law that makes this illegal, I'd be very interested to see such transnational legislation.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[Neuronwelder]

When you see commercials that really, actually, fascinate, amuse, or interest or have good music for you etc . Click on them. At the very least you will be surround with something you like!

Re: Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Was there ever an expectation of privacy in email? From day one everyone knew everyone and his brother can intercept and read email.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[Martin Blank]

It's still plaintext at the sending and receiving points unless someone used S/MIME or PGP.

Re:Give the consumers a refund on what they paid

[Martin Blank]

If looking at the content of messages sent by someone outside of your servers is illegal, then all automated mail filtering at the server level is illegal. The scammers certainly don't consent to you looking at their spam/phishing/malware to see if it should be sent off to another folder or even outright deleted.

There's nothing illegal about what Google is doing with Gmail. You can argue that there are ethical or moral reasons against it, but to argue legalities, especially without citing the criminal law it's allegedly breaking, is to undermine a critical part of modern information security.

Class actions are scams

[elrous0]

The lawyers get paid, the company gets indemnified from future lawsuits, the victims get some shitty coupons.

I strongly suspect that most class action suits are engineered by the companies themselves. They get free immunity for a relatively small payout to some lawyers.

Re:Class actions are scams

[ripvlan]

I can that being true - but think it is engineered by the lawyers to make money. They smell something - get somebody to toss up a complaint - and turn it into a class action.

I've even seen late night ads "Have you or someone you know been harmed by product XYZ - if so call our toll free number 1-800-make-us-rich" They are fishing for customers.

I remember years ago being involved in a class action with VW. It was "possible" for the sunroof to leak if I didn't clean out the drain lines --- which wasn't documented in the owners manual/service guide. Somebody actually had this problem and got wet. Lawyers were paid (big) millions of dollars and the rest of us received a New Page to place in our service guide --- plus a coupon for $50 off a future purchase. Not cash...a coupon. Not even a "free sunroof service" $50 bucks off. Geez - I get offers from VW in the mail all the time "Get your car serviced with us --- 10% off your next oil change or 20% off next service cycle" (which usually costs $200)

They come every other month -- for free. No class action required.

Re:Class actions are scams

[tlhIngan]

The lawyers get paid, the company gets indemnified from future lawsuits, the victims get some shitty coupons.

I strongly suspect that most class action suits are engineered by the companies themselves. They get free immunity for a relatively small payout to some lawyers

A class action lawsuit is designed to handle the case where individual victims may not be damaged "enough" to justify bringing a lawsuit. But there are lot of victims where it's economically viable to group together everyone as a class to punish the company.

Think of it this way - let's say you sign a contract for new cell phone, $20/month. But then you get your bill and find it's $21. You can call them over and over again and an hour later get your $1 back.Or just forget about it, since in the end it'll be $24 extra. It certainly isn't enough to bring them to court about.

Now, let's say the carrier did this on every customer - if they had a million customers, that's an extra million dollars a month. Enough to make it worthwhile to ALWAYS overcharge people. Individually, no one would be hurt too much - after a few months staying on the phone for an hour to get back $1 is too much work, and they can pocket the extra cash.

At what point is it too much? Perhaps next year they'll overcharge people $2, making a cool 2 million extra dollars every month. It's only $48 people will pay over a 2 year contract, so chance of being sued is low. It's certainly worthwhile to actually do it - free money. Because individually, no one will sue, and you can get away ripping people off.

Hence the class action - companies would get away with this because the damage to individual victims is too low to justify any one of them bringing forward a suit. But collectively, the amount is enough to go after.

As for why the victims get crappy rewards? Well, the whole lawsuit is paid for by the lawyers so all the risk is on them, and the victims themselves are basically getting it for free. Given the victims weren't likely to pursue litigation in the first place, it just means they get reimbursed for free - no risk and it's more than they were getting anyways.

You are free to exclude yourself from any class action you're involved with and bring about your own lawsuit, but chances are you're not going to get much better, especially after time, attorney's fees, etc

Re:Class actions are scams

[thegarbz]

the victims get some shitty coupons

Actually in this case the victims got a full 100% refund for what they paid for their service.

Re:Class actions are scams

[Neuronwelder]

Then by the same token, we should get indemnified from future speeding or parking tickets if we get one! What's fair is fair!

Re:Class actions are scams

[whit3]

The lawyers get paid, the company gets indemnified from future lawsuits, the victims get some shitty coupons.

Well, the judge says this particular class action settlement is inadequate on basically those grounds (the victims are NOT getting coupons, or anything else).

The class action lawyers are asked to put in some up-to-date factfinding, and find a way to at least tell the victims what happened, in exchange for Google telling them that the worst is over. Well, technically it's over, the victims won't see any noticeable difference.

Huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a giant, much-national company spying on my data? I never thought that this could happen!

What Terms of Service?

- Posted from Windows 10

Re:Yes, but

[Martin Blank]

Settlements don't set precedent.