California Senate Sends Gmail a Message   - 1,943 Views, 1 Comment

Now, Aunty is old enough to remember some real wholesale intrusions on privacy, and jaded enough to question anyone having obviously invasive powers, but there are a few things which occur to Aunty - maybe it’s her doddering age, but:

1. Google is a business entity, not a government, for chrissakes. Business entities invade your privacy all the time, especially when you are availing yourself of their services - if you don’t like it, don’t sign up for their services. The reason that a private high school can perform a locker search, and a public school cannot, is because the public school is, arguably, a government entity. The reason that pretty much everyone and their dog now tell you, while you are on hold for 112 minutes when calling their customer service line, that “this call may be monitored for training purposes” but the nice men in the blue suits have to get a warrant to listen in on your conversations is because, again, the men in suits work for a government agency. The people who put you on hold do not. Deal with it.

2. Gmail is a voluntary service, and you’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to not know at this point, before signing up for their free services (and did Aunty mention that it’s voluntary?), that they scan your email for content in order to serve up their Adsense ads with your email. (”Would you like spam with that?”)

3. Google is doing nothing different in terms of scanning email content than any one of dozens of spam filtering companies do - for which their users often pay them handsomely, not slap them with restrictive legislation.

But, on the whole, it’s a really good thing that Ms. Senator Figueroa is spearheading this new law, because goodness knows that in the U.S., and in California in particular, we wouldn’t want to break with tradition and societal culture and..you know, make people be accountable and responsible for their own decisions. Oh no.