The Lawsuit Against Google for Email Scanning Will Go Forward

Google's all about making sure the right ads get to the right person, and will go to great lengths, including scanning your email to do it. That's why ads for dog food pop up alongside your Gmails about your new puppy. You'd think, or so goes Google logic, that we'd all be grateful for a company willing to go to such lengths to enhance your consumer experience.

But no, instead Google is getting slapped with a class-action lawsuit. Despite Google's protestations that it was only trying to help, the lawsuit is going forward.

A US District Court judge in California ruled that a class-action lawsuit against Google will be allowed to proceed. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claims that Google violated state and federal wiretapping laws by scanning emails sent via Gmail for keywords in order to target ads toward the user. Google had filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, on September 5, calling its email scanning “ordinary course of business,” which would be allowed under the Wiretap Act, and claiming that email scanning was done for the benefit of its users, allowing for spam filters and those Priority Inboxes that no one remembers asking for.

Federal Judge Lucy Koh wasn’t buying it though, calling the “alleged interception of emails at issue here…both physically and purposively unrelated to Google’s provision of email services.” Rather than being protected by wiretapping laws, Google could be found in violation of them.

She wrote in her decision that, “a reasonable Gmail user who read the Privacy Policies would not have necessarily understood that her emails were being intercepted to create user profiles or to provide targeted advertisements.”

What’s more, Gmail scans through emails sent to Gmail accounts. So people who use other email services who send email to a Gmail user—or if the emails are at some point forwarded to a Gmail account—were subject to a terms of service agreement that they had never read. "Google has cited no case that stands for the proposition that users who send emails impliedly consent to interceptions and use of their communications by third parties other than the intended recipient of the email," Koh wrote.

John M. Simpson, Privacy Project director for nonprofit consumer advocate group Consumer Watchdog, called the rulling “a historic step for holding Internet communications subject to the same privacy laws that exist in the rest of society.”

“The ruling means federal and state wiretap laws apply to the Internet,” said Simpson, “It's a tremendous victory for online privacy. Companies like Google can't simply do whatever they want with our data and emails.”

Two parts of the lawsuit were dismissed, including the plantiffs' appeals to the California Invasion of Privacy Act, which Google protested wasn't relevant, given that the plantiffs aren't all in California, and that law can't possibly apply to email, since it's from 1967—there's an undercurrent of "our paper laws are too antiquated for how we now communicate" pervading both sides of this lawsuit. The plantiff will have 21 days to amend these complaints.