Privacy advocates say Google's e-mail scanning process a dangerous precedent

IDG News Service - Google Inc.'s planned Web-based e-mail service is a big target for privacy advocates upset by the gigabyte storage capacity to be offered users and the company's plans to scan communications for advertising purposes. And the name Gmail could soon be the subject of a trademark dispute.
A coalition of 28 privacy and civil liberties groups wrote Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page this week urging them to rethink the service, which they say sets potentially dangerous precedents for automated scanning of private communications. The service may conflict with European privacy laws and should be suspended until privacy issues are addressed, they wrote in a letter Tuesday.
The letter's signatories include the World Privacy Forum, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Bits of Freedom, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Foundation for Information Policy Research and Privacy International.
When Mountain View, Calif.-based Google announced the Gmail service March 31 (see story), it said it would scan the text of all incoming e-mail in order to place appropriate advertisements. That's a bad idea, according to the privacy campaigners, because "the scanning of confidential e-mail violates the implicit trust of an e-mail service provider."
Many e-mail systems already scan message content in an effort to block spam, but inserting ads in incoming e-mail is fundamentally different from removing harmful viruses and unwanted spam, the campaigners said. Inserting ads on the fly requires a chain of directories, databases and logs, and a long memory. Those auditing trails could be correlated with data collected from Google's search site or social networking site Orkut, they said.

Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, sought to reassure the campaigners. He said in an interview that the Gmail user's name isn't sent to the ad server, and when the system scans the e-mail, it doesn't look at the "To" or "From" fields, only the subject and body of the mail.
Whatever the details of Gmail's scanning process, it sets dangerous precedents and reduces users' expectations of the privacy of e-mail, the civil liberties groups said. "These precedents may be adopted by other companies and governments and may persist long after Google is gone," the letter said.
One of the letter's signatories emphasized this danger in a telephone interview. "The mail is not just being scanned. It's also being indexed, and governments might want to know if a word is in the index and, if so, who used it," said Maurice Wessling of Bits of Freedom, a civil liberties organization in Amsterdam.
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