Google was accused of illegal wiretapping for intercepting emails to Gmail accounts and publishing content-related ads. This lawsuit targets at email users who do not have Gmail accounts and have therefore not signed the company’s acceptance terms. The terms are that Google can intercept your emails and use them for direct marketing purposes. Google scans their emails anyway and thus violates wiretap laws in some states.
Google acknowledged that it routinely scans emails for spam and computer viruses, but said that’s permitted under similar federal wiretap laws. It also argued that selling advertising based on the content of a receive email is a routine business practice permitted under an exception written into the wiretap law. Google notes Yahoo and other email providers sell ads through similar methods. Scanning emails for spam and computer viruses are reasonable, but this is different of sending content-related commercials. Filtering spam and computer viruses is a service that benefits users, while ads may not be that favorable. In addition, a common commercial model does not guarantee its correctness. Other major email providers’ act cannot be Google’s excuse of doing the same thing.
Google lawyer Michael G. Rhodes said “There can be little doubt that selling advertising in order to provide a free service to consumers is a ‘legitimate business goal’. If it were not, then the entire model by which content is provided on the Internet would be illegitimate, as would the business model by which television programming has been provided for free for the last half century.” Obviously, this is a false analogy. Television is a passive media, so the commercials are not audience-selective. Likewise, users select the content on their own will when online surfing. Neither of them scans users’ private information.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, also found Google’s behavior unreasonable, and his word may present thoughts of the general public. He said, “What if you were making a call on your Verizon cellphone, and you were talkin got an Italian restaurant trying to make reservations for Friday and a Verizon agent jumped on the line and said, ‘Oh, how about this place’? You are not supposed to be listening to my communications to try to sell me stuff.”