GOOGLE: If You Use Gmail, You Have 'No Legitimate
Expectation Of Privacy'
By Paul Szoldra
Published 4:47 pm, Tuesday, August 13, 2013
If you happen to be one of the 400 million people who use
Google's Gmail service for sending and receiving emails, you shouldn't have any
expectation of privacy, according to a court briefing obtained by the Consumer
Watchdog website.
In a motion filed last month by Google to have a class
action complaint dismissed, Google's lawyers reference a 1979 ruling, holding
that people who turn over information to third parties shouldn't expect that
information to remain private.
From the filing (emphasis added):
Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague
cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who
use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are
processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery. Indeed, “a
person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily
turns over to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979).
In particular, the Court noted that persons communicating through a service
provided by an intermediary (in the Smith case, a telephone call routed through
a telephone company) must necessarily expect that the communication will be
subject to the intermediary’s systems. For example, the Court explained that in
using the telephone, a person “voluntarily convey[s] numerical information to
the telephone company and ‘expose[s]’ that information to its equipment in the
ordinary course of business.” Id. at 744 (emphasis added).
It should be noted that in January 2012, Supreme Court
Justice Sonia Sotomayer cited the same case as Google (Smith v. Maryland), but
she argued that business transactions over the phone or internet are not
automatically disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.
“Google has finally admitted they don’t respect privacy,”
said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director, in a news
release. “People should take them at their word; if you care about your email
correspondents’ privacy don’t use Gmail.”
The lengthy brief goes on to maintain that Google uses
automated processes to sift through email for the purposes of providing spam
filters, relevant advertising, and other features of the Gmail service. The
opposition complaint however, takes issue with this, saying the company is
instead trying "to capture the [email] authors' actual thoughts for
Google's secret use."
Google argues the terms of service and privacy policy of
Gmail lays out their automated processes of scanning email — and by agreeing to
use the service, users are bound to those terms.
The company's reasoning shouldn't come as a huge shock.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told a CNBC interviewer in 2009 the
company is bound to the federal terms of the U.S. PATRIOT Act.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to
know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt said.
"But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search
engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And ...
we're all subject, in the United States, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible
that that information could be made available to the authorities."
Comments
Post a Comment