Re:Google sued for data-mining students' email
by mgkimsal on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @08:46AM
(#7428217)
I wasn't reacting to what you're allowed to do with it, or what rights I may or may not have. It was the 'implication' part stated earlier. There's no implication when I send a message that I want anything other than the message to be read by the recipient. That's it.
Re:Google sued for data-mining students' email
by Oletros on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @07:36AM
(#7427932)
Google is not handling your mail, it is handling the receiver email
Re:Google sued for data-mining students' email
by thaumasiotes on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @08:11AM
(#7428057)
You don't have any rights in a physical letter you send away. There would be no issue with the recipient engaging a service to handle letters that happen to be sent to them, and that service processing those letters however they saw fit, including by recording information about the sender(s).
I guess what I'm saying is... what's your point?
edit:
You appear to be misreading your parent comment. The parallel situation they describe is precisely that the recipient engages a company to process their mail (read the description: "you hire some company to sort and collate your mail (and toss out your junk mail for you), and in exchange they slip in some coupons [for] people who get the kind of mail that you do". All of that applies to receiving mail, not sending it.)
And this is precisely what's happening with Google: if you send mail to my gmail address, I've engaged Google to process it on my behalf. You have no say in the matter, nor can you.
Meanwhile, no, you have no right to dictate how I contract out how I handle my mail by sending me a letter. You gave me that letter, and you'd have a difficult time making a case even if I then proceeded to make thousands of physical copies of it and distributed it at a street corner.