The World Privacy Forum and 27 other privacy and civil liberties groups have sent a letter to Google urging the company to suspend its Gmail service until the privacy issues are adequately addressed.
The letter, sent to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, expressed concern over Google’s plan to scan the text of all incoming messages for the purposes of inserting ads, which violates the implicit trust of an email service provider, the privacy groups said in a statement issued on Tuesday. They believe the scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the email medium and may establish dangerous precedents.
“Inserting new content from third party advertisers in incoming emails is fundamentally different than removing harmful viruses and unwanted spam,” the letter said.
The groups also want Google to clarify its written information policies regarding data retention and data sharing among its business units. Other concerns include the unlimited period for data retention that Google’s current policies allow, and the potential for unintended secondary uses of the information Gmail will collect and store.
“The societal consequences of initiating a global infrastructure to continually monitor the communications of individuals are significant and far-reaching with immediate and long-term privacy implications,” the letter said.
Google has countered criticism of Gmail by highlighting that a computer, not a human, will scan the content of the e-mail, thereby making the system less invasive, the groups said.
But the groups think a computer system, with its greater storage, memory, and associative ability than a human’s, could be just as invasive as a human listening to the communications, if not more so.
(via Privacy Rights Clearinghouse )
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