Google doesn’t want the public to know how its spying on you

MassPrivateI

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 e-mails.

Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools.  

Google Apps for Education, which has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the company for free to thousands of educational institutions in the United States.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off—even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads. The company would not say whether those email scans are used to help build profiles of students or other Apps for Education users, but said the results of its data mining are not used to actually target ads to Apps for Education users unless they choose to receive them.

Google, is fighting a lawsuit claiming its interception of e-mails amounts to illegal wiretapping, asked U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in a filing yesterday 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 e-mails 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.

The Feb. 27 hearing in federal court in San Jose, California, was to determine whether the lawsuit will proceed as a group suit, or class action. Koh’s ruling will have implications for other e-mail privacy cases assigned to her that were filed last year against Yahoo! Inc. and LinkedIn Corp.

Rommel told Koh that Google made the change after determining that Content Onebox couldn’t extract information from e-mails that hadn’t been opened or deleted, or that were opened on an iPhone or sent through an e-mail provider other than Google.

After the switch to scanning unopened e-mails, Google began creating profiles of people “from which they could extrapolate additional advertisements,” Rommel said, without giving details of how Content Onebox works.

“Google itself has admitted and declared that the location and the timing of Content Onebox’s existence is proprietary, it’s secret, it’s unknown,” Rommel said at the Feb. 27 hearing. “There’s not a single disclosure in the record which identifies that there’s a content extraction feature occurring in the delivery process, which would be the interception.”

Google’s attempt to black out portions of the transcript that haven’t been publicly reported in press accounts is at odds with statements from Michael Rhodes, the Mountain View, California-based company’s lawyer.

At the hearing, Rommel discussed a predecessor to “Content Onebox” called “Cat II mixer,” which he said was used for Google’s advertising business. Rommel also claimed Google’s interception of e-mails violates opt-out agreements that educational institutions or small businesses signed to shield themselves from the company’s scans.

Google has said in court documents that its practice of scanning e-mails and use of scanned information isn’t a secret.

“However, the mechanics of how Google performs those processes are sensitive, both for user security reasons and for competitive reasons,” Google argued in a court filing. “The specific techniques that Google uses to implement Gmail’s processes, the systems and infrastructure it uses to apply those processes, and the sequences in which it applies those processes are the result of over nine years of development by Google’s engineers.”

The media companies contend Google improperly sought to seal, for example, an e-mail exchange between employees analyzing different Gmail systems, and documents describing an experiment conducted to better understand how users interact with Gmail, and why they click on ads, according to a court filing.

Google’s sealing order relies on a “nebulous economic harm” that the company claims could result from “the public disclosure of any information about Google’s business model or technology,” the media companies said in a court filing.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-14/google-wants-e-mail-scanning-information-blocked.html
http://www.govtech.com/education/Google-Under-Fire-for-Data-Mining-Student-Email-Messages.html

http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-doesnt-want-public-to-know-how_17.html