Google CEO Larry Page
By Julie Bort
On Tuesday Google updated its privacy policies to make it absolutely clear that it is scanning your email.
It added these sentences:
Our automated systems analyze
your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant
product features, such as customized search results, tailored
advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the
content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
It also tweaked a few sentences
that warn that all the stuff you upload to Google is considered fair
game. (Google included the editing marks, to show you exactly which
words it changed):
When you upload,or otherwise
submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you
give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host,
store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those
resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so
that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish,
publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
This information comes at an interesting time. Google is being sued over e-mail scanning, in a suit from 2013, where the plaintiffs allege that Google violated wiretapping laws by scanning the content of e-mails, Ars Technica's Casey Johnston reports.
However, last month, the judge in
the case did not allow the suit to go forward as a class-action suit.
That put a damper on the case because individual email users would each
need to pursue lawsuits, Johnston reports
The change in the privacy policy also comes on the heels of Microsoft's decision to put its "Scroogled"
ad campaign on the back burner. Scroogled was Microsoft's attempt to
bash Google over issues like email scanning. But t hanks to a recent
re-org, the guy running the Scroogled campaign no longer controls the ad budget, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports.
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