Three privacy groups led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center want California attorney general Bill Lockyer's office to investigate Google over a Gmail feature that displays targeted ads based on e-mailers' content - a feature the groups say violates California laws against eavesdropping on confidential communications.
"Last month, 31 privacy and civil liberties groups urged Google to suspend the Gmail service, noting that the scanning of confidential e-mail for inserting third-party marketing content violates the implicit trust of an e-mail service provider," said the May 3 letter to Lockyer, signed by EPIC associate director Chris Hoofnagle, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse spokeswoman Beth Givens, and World Privacy Forum executive director Pam Dixon.
"The groups argued that the e-mail scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the medium and may establish dangerous precedents. Google, however, continues to operate the service in beta testing.... We believe that Gmail violates California's wiretapping laws, subjecting both Google and Gmail users to criminal and civil penalties. Accordingly, we respectfully request that your office investigate the Gmail service."
The authors copied the letter to California Office of Privacy Protection chief Joanna McNabb and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
"All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights," Hoofnagle, Givens and Dixon wrote. "Unlike privacy guarantees flowing from the federal Constitution, the California right protects individuals and privacy violations committed by both state actors and by private entities.... If the right of privacy is to exist as more than a memory or a dream, the power of both public and private institutions to collect and preserve data about individual citizens must be subject to constitutional control."
The trio said California's wiretapping law bars Google from scanning Gmail messages, based on legislative language saying science and technology advances have provoked "new devices and techniques for the purpose of eavesdropping upon private communications and that the invasion of privacy resulting from the continual and increasing use of such devices and techniques has created a serious threat to the free exercise of personal liberties and cannot be tolerated in a free and civilized society."
EPIC's alarm about Gmail isn't restricted to whether Google is using it to mine correspondence for targeted ad placements. In late April, through staff counsel Marcia Hofmann, EPIC made a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI about whether the bureau might use Gmail and even Google search technology for law enforcement intelligence reasons.
That triggered a thunderous response from Cato Institute telecommunications studies director Adam Thierer, who accused EPIC and others of becoming "privacy absolutists" who can't distinguish between government forcing us to do things against our will and a private enterprise like Google whose Gmail service is not being forced upon any e-mail user.
"Google... isn't holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to sign up," Thierer wrote in a letter circulated in cyberspace last week. "If you're concerned about how government might co-opt this service for its own nefarious ends, that is not a Google problem, that is a Big Government problem. Let's work together to properly limit the surveillance powers of government instead of shutting down any new private service or technology that we feel the feds might have to chance to abuse."
