Google wants email mining data to be secret
By Joel Rosenblatt, Bloomberg
Google Inc., the world’s largest Internet-search provider, is seeking to black out portions of a transcript from a public court hearing that includes information on how it mines data from personal emails.
Google, fighting a lawsuit claiming its interception of emails amounts to illegal wiretapping, asked U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in a filing last week to redact “confidential” information from the transcript, without being more specific. The main revelation at the Feb. 27 hearing was the existence of “Content Onebox,” used by Google to intercept emails for targeted advertising and to build user profiles, Sean Rommel, a lawyer for plaintiffs, told the judge at the time.
Google’s latest move to keep records in the case out of public view comes as Koh is weighing a request by companies including National Public Radio, New York Times Co. and Washington Post Co. to unseal other key documents filed earlier that the company contended were too sensitive to be revealed.
OMG! Google does not want to be transparent about it email gathering system. “I am shocked! I tell you SHOCKED to find gambling in this establishment.” Casablanca…
so what is your point? That just because that is their position, no one should be concerned about it or insist on communications being private. We don’t expect (or allow by law) the US post office to w/o warrants to look through the contents of our letters, why should we tolerate electric monitoring by a private company. That fact that gmail is not fee for service is irrelevant – their business model is designed to generate revenue and it is their obligation to find a way to do so that withstands court scrutiny. I am more and more convinced that the greatest threat to liberty in the U.S. is not what so many wackos are complaining about (i.e., the Affordable Care Act) but a complacent populace that accepts so much negative stuff as just the price of doing business.
Um James. Most email is sent as text over the internet and anybody with a proxy server and access to a backbone router can read all they want. I find it ironic that the one of the largest collectors of data, Google, wants to now cover up their collection techniques and then I would quess some of the data itself. Google did just start out as a just another search engine, but how it has grown.