"Mayayana" wrote
.....


A followup to this discussion that may be of interest
to some. I found Google's actual filing for the case I linked.
It's a fascinating piece of pretzel logic:

http://www.dslreports.com/r0/downloa...iss-061313.pdf

Pages 19/20 address the argument that non-gmail
customers have not approved reading their email and
the case that email is assumed to be confidential. Both
apply to the charge of wiretap infringement.

Google claims those charges are invalid. "Any reasonably intelligent
person, savvy enough to be using the Internet..." knows that
their email will be recorded at the destination.
And they claim people have implicitly agreed to Google's terms
simply by sending an email.
They further claim that Federal law exempts them from prosecution
because it "allows providers of email services like Google to “store”
and “access” emails sent to its systems."

The entire case Google makes rests on one, single, half-witted
sleight of hand. Or rather a bald-faced lie:

Asserting that reading email content and storing the email
beyond the required time, even after it's been deleted by the
account owner, is all just part of the basic handling required
to provide an email service. That reading your mail to aid
in ad-targetting comes under the category of unavoidable
recording of the message as part of its transit.

Google actually assert that they can't do their job otherwise.
They attempt to erase the distinction between accessing content
that passes through their servers vs merely handling that passage.
Which is equivalent to a mailman claiming he has to read your
mail in order to deliver it properly, and that, in fact, there's no
difference between him only delivering the mail or also reading it.

In a display of surprising nerve (or fuzzy mindedness) they
actually equate their accessing of private correspondence with
a phone company necessarily needing to know the number you
call on your phone!

Throughout their motion they try to equate "storing a record"
during transmission of email with co-ownership and unrestricted
access to content. In other words, if it touches our server then
"All your data are belong to us". Because? Because it has to
belong to us to touch our server.