"Gmail users have no ‘reasonable expectation’ that their e-mail are confidential," says Google in a court filing last month. The said document was written in reply to a class-action lawsuit reproving Google of violating wiretap law when it scans e-mails.
Petitioners accuse Google of breaching the users’ privacy by mining their private messages for information which targeted ads it displays. The suit is calling for Google to fully reveal exactly what information is taken from e-mails, and to compensate damages for the alleged violations of privacy.
Google, in its motion to dismiss the case, argues that “all users of e-mails must necessarily expect that their e-mails will be subject to automated processing."
The company avows that, theoretically, if you entrust you messages to a third party, you can’t expect that any information won’t be touched by the third party.
It has also been argued that limiting how e-mail providers are allowed to process the information they receive could be “criminalize” features like inbox searches and spam filtering.
A Google spokesperson told the Huffington Post, "We take our users’ privacy and security very seriously; recent reports claiming otherwise are simply untrue. We have built industry-leading security and privacy features into Gmail -- and no matter who sends an email to a Gmail user, those protections apply."
In 2011, the company made peace with the Federal Trade Commission when charged of employing “deceptive” privacy practices during the launch of Google Buzz in 2010.
In June, Google was determined by the Guardian newspaper as one of the companies that gives “direct access to its systems” to NSA as part of PRISM, a surveillance program. Google said that it’s not true. David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer said in an interview with the Huffington Post that the company is "not in cahoots with the NSA and there's no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported."
