California Senate Passes Preemptive Strike Against Gmail

Technically Inept writes "The California Senate has passed a measure to force Google to limit search capabilities on Gmail to real-time, with no records. What if I want them to search my mail in advance?"

Not necessarily bad

[aramith]

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Yeah, legislating technology that doesn't really even exist yet isn't THAT good, but neither is your email provider data mining you, and possibly selling that info to other companies. Plus, it is email. Sensitive data may pass through that (you'd be stupid to use something like Gmail or Hotmail to do so, but it happens).

Can they even do that....

[Jim Starx]

Can the government restrict what type of information a company collects on its customers when they volentarily opt in to it, especially when thats kinda the point of the service?

Initial thoutghts.

[vicviper]

Time for google to move out of Cali.

Is this law necessary if they disclose such practices? Isn't it up to the consumer not to use the product?

Time for google not to offer gmail in cali.

Just knee-jerk thoughts after reading the article.

Re:You can sign away rights, yes? :-)

[DaHat]

... and yet cigarettes and caffeine are legal.

You can sell yourself into slavery of sorts, in this case to an addictive substance and the slave drivers that produce and sell them... just so long as said substance is legal.

Re:What, do lawmakers get paid per law now?

[TheRealMindChild]

While I agree with you for THE MOST PART, it really CAN NOT always be that way.

Remember the 80's when credit card companies would give anyone a credit card at like 50% interest, compounded minutely? Some people were just stupid... some mislead... but either way, it had to stop, because even though there was a mutual agreement, more times then not, people signed away their soul because of other dire situations.

This IS good. It keeps commercial entities from offering a service, and requiring your soul as payment. As rediculous as some corperations would be, there would always be someone that will sign their life away.

Re:What, do lawmakers get paid per law now?

[six11]

Just one of my many ideas on how to make government better: affix a time limit on every law. When the time limit is up, they have to vote on it again, and it has to pass with a larger percentage than it did the first time. Not only would this cull out silly knee-jerk laws like Patriot or this Google nonsense, it would also force lawmakers to deal with their mistakes by repealing laws, rather than spending time fucking things up for everybody else and increasing the number of laws on the books.

Re California: If Cally is so cool, why are you all migrating to Colorado?

What!?

[Neurotoxic666]

First, those who voted for that bill most probably can't even turn on a damn computer. Let alone use an email service. The story should end right here. But these technophobic fuckers actualy have some power over what Google can do.

Google is a private company and they offer a free -- FREE -- service to users who agree to some terms and conditions of use. These users will most likely be very happy to use this service.

Now can anyone tell me why should the govt even consider thinking about voting anything concerning Gmail!?

No one is FORCED to use it. It's not like a Govt agency decides to send you spam based on your credit report and your annual income... Google is private and the users are free to use it or not.

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. I can't. Nothing justifies the intervention of the government in a free, web-based service. Nothing at all. Google does not hide anything and is not violating any law.

The only basis for the vote is that "Google is huge", or something like that. It's just one step away from voting a bill against, say, an automotive email newsletter that contains car ads; or any other free service on the web for that matter.

They just should not have any jurisdiction over the internet... Just screw them. Or better yet: patent the bill and sue them for copyright infringement. I just can't believe those daily stupidities....

Per-company laws???

[dynamo]

I didn't think it was legal to single out particular companies for laws to apply to.. it shouldn't be, at least.

In defense of the state...

[Improv]

Playing devil's advocate here, at least partly.. why/when, in general, is government intervention worthwhile in certain contracts? From a libertarian POV, probably never, or almost never (e.g. preventing certain types of abuses, e.g. slavery). From a liberal point of view, there are some types of contracts that are so naturally one-sided, e.g. landlord-tenant relations, that in order to prevent one side from being excessively harmed by the concentration of power on the other side, the government has seen fit to legislate. One necessary (but not sufficient) component of these types of deals is that the services offered are sufficiently necessary and scarce that it is difficult to live life without them. Another is that there exists a pattern of abuse by one side. It is left as an exercise to the reader to judge this means of thinking about things, and decide what the exact criteria should be for when and what intervention is proper.

Are you sure about that?

[Pausanias]

I would bet that Yahoo and Hotmail are already searching through their users' email and storing the results for ads. They just haven't made the fact public like Google has.

Disclosure good, forced terms bad.

[Skyshadow]

There's nothing wrong with forcing a company to disclose what they're going to do. There's nothing wrong with forcing them to put it in simple language, nothing wrong with forcing them to point out other options.

It *is* wrong, however, to force a company to abide by certain terms in regards to totally legal activities.

Let's say that AT&T came out with a new cell plan tomorrow: You can call anyplace with your phone for as long as you want anytime for free. Beforehand, though, you have to listen to an ad for some company and press in a code they mention to prove you listened to the ad.

Should I have the right to sign up for this service? Of course I should -- I'm bartering my time and attention rather than my money, but it's a fair (and legal) trade.

What if AT&T offered the same deal, except that they wanted to be able to listen in on my call if they wanted to. Should I still have the right to sign up? Should I still have the right to decide if I'd rather spend $40 a month on my phone or give up my privacy?

I mean, I'm an adult. WTF does the government get off making these decisions for me, esp. when the people making the laws are a bunch of idiots to begin with?

Re:Good thinking there, shooter.

[MindStalker]

Well google is still rolling it out (which I think makes it insane that california would react the a service that doesn't even exist before seeing its final version) and they havn't needed california yet. While california pays more for most everything I seriously doupt internet sites get a bigger chuck of money from californians than from anywhere else. Google is currently limiting their use to just a few hundred (or maby 5, I don't know) it won't hurt them really to limit their final product to just the rest of the world minus California. Maybe it will atleast teacher california government to get ALL its facts straight before passing laws like this. Or maby it won't, probably it won't. :)

Re:No kidding

[JofCoRe]

The only argument that I've heard that makes any sense is if someone is against Gmail beacuse of this ad thing, so they dont sign up for the service, but then all their friends do so when they send email tot hem, their emails are scanned for content, even though they're not signed up with the service.

Hmm, messages scanned for content by the receiving mail server... nothing at all like these MailScanner [mailscanner.info] and SpamAssassin [spamassassin.org] packages that we have installed on our mailservers, that scan every piece of received mail for content. :)

(and we don't even tell the sender that we're "reading" their mail!)

Re:Not exactly against Google

[ajs]

The bill, as I've read in other articles is agaisnt any service retaining information about the contents of people's emails. They can still scan it realtime and give ads based on keywords, but they can't store it in a database or share that information with other people.

Which is patently absurd.

Seriously, think about what it means to say, you can't store mail in a database. Ok, so hotmail is illegal in California? They certainly store mail in a database and perform searches against it...

The interesting thing about Gmail is that it applies Google searching technology to email.

What is the expected gain here? How is California protecting its citizens? To pass a law that says you can't give out information about a customer's email is one thing, but to say that you can't store it... well that certainly cripples mail technology.

Re:Only here, apparently.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

"steal and spend" fits better- that's the neoconservative movement for you, give all the taxes back to the rich and then keep the rich in business by spending money the government no longer has.

Government once again proves...

[Seth Cohn]

it's all about control for them. What they stop? Who did they help? Who did they 'protect'? Google will spend time and energy fighting this, or have to work around it, and nobody benefits except the lawmakers who claim they 'did the right thing'.

Yeah, just like CANSPAM stopped spam. (it didn't)

Are you tired of government doing things like this? Me too.

That's why I've join the Free State Project [freestateproject.org]. Imagine 20K liberty minded people all standing up for freedom, willing to be politcally active, and using technology and common sense to achieve a free society. We'll advocate for the end of victimless crime laws (no more drug laws, sex laws, nanny laws), allow privacy tools like encryption, and reduce the size government down to as small as we can make it, lowering taxes, and always respect the rights of those around us. Are you even mildly libertarian? Do you believe that this country is becoming more and more about 'You aren't allowed unless the state says so?' Join us, and help achieve liberty in your lifetime.

Re:Why does this need legislation?

[Ba3r]

I agree.. I have a gmail account and I love it

Personally, I take comfort in my mail being sifted by google's algorithms. With the sheer volume of email going back and forth, and the limited capability of parsing and sorting it, I don't see email monitoring as having any future in anything 'dangerous'. If i was for some reason discussing i thought to be worthy of privacy, i would encrypt it..

I mean c'mon, if someone was interested in 'monitoring' for political activity, or blackmail potential, they would be making their task significantly greater by adding all the trite email conversations into their processing. I highly doubt that the FBI is curious as to me and my friends discussion of Bush's incompetence, or Al Qaeda's tactics. That requires an analyst to read my email, valuable resources saved for confirmed danger. If i was really discussing something secret.. well, its my own damn fault for thinking that the internet is a secure medium. The only people concerned about this are the ones who have little understanding of the actual Volume of email that is sent/received, and the real nature of security.

Does this bill target Gmail by name?

[flamingweasel]

Not having the text of the bill, I'm a little confused: would this outlaw something like a bayesian spam filter on a server in California? That kind of filter does not filter in "real time" (I think they mean to say "when the mail is read") and it keeps records (word frequency). So did these knuckleheads just outlaw spam filters, or does the text of the bill name Gmail or Google specifically?

WTF is this actually about?

[The Pim]

This summary made no sense to me. What the hell is a record? I searched around and found Senator Figueroa's page about the bill [ca.gov], which rambles all over the map before finishing with the proposal prohibiting "scrutinizing of e-mail messages ... for direct marketing" without the consent of both sender and recipient. Not only would this knock Gmail flat, it depends upon the absurd claim (supported by some specious reasoning above) that merely being shown a targeted ad is a privacy violation.

However, this apparently describes an earlier draft, because this somewhat better article [siliconvalley.com] says the bill is about amassing personal information (ie, keeping email that's been deleted) and sharing it with third parties. Which are much more legitimate concerns, but have nothing to do with the targeted ad and search features of Gmail.

So what's the real story? It almost sounds like the revised bill is just a cover for Senator Figueroa's embarrassing early draft.

More Information for your reading (dis)pleasure

[IanDanforth]

The State Senator who authored this Bill is Liz Figueroa (D). While she has long be a defender of privacy, she isn't really up on her facts as you can decern for yourself. A summary of her bill, you can find here:

http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/senator/figueroa/

(Type "gmail" into the search box")

She also has a convenient Feeback option which you can use to educate her, or share your thoughts.

Luckily amendments to the bill bring it into line with what Google was going to do anyway.

-Ian Danforth

Re:What!?

[srNeu]

"If you don't live in California, shut up this does not affect you."

If the California legislature can restrict Google's OPTIONAL service, then this does too affect me, a non-Californian.

However, I do agree with your statement "If you do live in California, vote these people out"

Why is there so much AGAINST this law?

[hellfire]

To me the jury is still out on Gmail, because I don't trust any company, Google included, to responsibly use my personal information. Let me play devils advocate for just a second.

1) This bill according to everything I can see only restricts Google to how it can advertise. It can advertise on demand as emails are brought up, but what it can't do is create a massive indexed database with personal information based on emails I send with which to shell out advertisements to me. Why aren't more people scared to death of a database like that? We bitch and moan about governments creating databases like that, and giving up information to advertisers, why aren't we scared of this?

2) Everyone here is saying "if you don't like it, don't sign up for it." Great, but what happens when Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, etc, start doing it themselves? It makes it a lot more serious, especially if all those guys now have databases with personal information. My nice local ISP doesn't have that problem, but consumers are decent people who just don't have time to learn all this computer shit like everyone else, so they use hotmail. Go easy on them.

3) Does anyone one have a link to this law... PLEASE? People claim to have "read" this law but I'm too damn lazy to go searching for it when I've never even bothered to go to the California website to check it out. If there's no link here how are people making real comments on it... flamers usually don't usually read this stuff anyway so pardon me if I don't trust the Slashdot crowd ;) All I can go by is this article, for now.

4) This isn't restricting if Gmail can advertise, just how and what it does with personal information. There are already several laws and practices on the books about personal information. Collecting personal information is a huge boon to any major company because then they can shove ads down your throat, despite what most people truly want. Doing the wrong thing with personal information gets some companies in hot water but a lot of times it creates a huge windfall for that same company.

Mail

[chamblah]

If you are sending e-mail, assume it is read by a dozen people between you and the recipient.

All email that I send, unless it's encrypted, I treat the same as if I was sending a postcard and assume everyone between me and the recipient can & will read the contents.

Re:Only here, apparently.

[spectral]

That is not your business, and not under your control. Encrypt the email in an attachment to them if it matters so much to you, and you trust THEM to not scan it or do other subversive things to it. You send a (snail mail) letter out to a friend, that friend can do whatever they want to it. Including typing it up and putting it on a webpage. Which google will then scan. As long as they attribute it (which in some cases would probably make this slip of judgement worse), then there's no legal issue with this that I am aware of.

So yes, if someone has a gmail account, and you're paranoid about some (as far as we know) non-scientient technology reading your email, then don't send them an email. But if I ever get email from you, I'm going to post it to a webpage now. In fact, I might even post your slashdot comment.. Oh wait, it'll already be scanned by the big bad google. And other companies, most of which I trust a hell of a lot less than google.

If you're paranoid, make it so google can't read it (encrypted attachment) and get on with your life. If you care that much though, this probably isn't good enough for you, though I don't know why.

Note: I enjoy the freedoms of encryption and understand paranoia. I'm not saying that not wanting peope to read it is necessarily a bad thing, just that it's not you that should have to consent to google scanning it, it's the recipient, like always.