Why should google care what you are ok with after they already have all your data? If you don't want them to be able to engage in activities like this then don't give them your data in the first place.
It's still my data. Post office employees are not allowed to read my letters, even though I have given them into their care.
There are very good reasons why we, as a society, have agreed to disallow many activities that are physically possible. There's a good case to be made that such a rule should be explicitly added where organizations are entrusted with private data.
I'd love a world in which email providers would be held to the same standards as the post office.
But that's not the world we currently live in.
The only thing that sets a limit on what google can do with your data is the amount of data you give them. They also have terms of service and privacy policies but these can change over time and/or be re-interpreted in creative new ways to enable whatever it is they want to do next.
Well yes. The main part of your comment is descriptive: you are describing the state of the world as it is today.
However, there is a normative side to the debate as well. This is what I (and you in your first line) explicitly referred to. This side is about asking what state of the world is desirable. It is perfectly legitimate and good to ask this question, so that we might hopefully act upon the answer once it has been found. That is how progress is made in the world.
The concept of data ownership doesn't make much sense. Data is infinitely copyable and infinitely inferrable, thanks to magic of causality (at Google scale, if I couldn't read something from your mail, I could probably correlate it out of your search queries, web browsing patterns and location history). The discussion should be about ways to obtain a particular piece of information and the ways to use it.
The perfect example to illustrate this is actually what waterlesscloud wrote downthread:
> If I leave some loose hairs on an airline seat, does the airline now own my dna?
Do you own your DNA? What the hell would that even mean?
"Neither Lacks nor her family gave her physician permission to harvest the cells. At that time, permission was neither required nor customarily sought. The cells were later commercialized. In the 1980s, family medical records were published without family consent. This issue and Mrs. Lacks' situation was brought up in the Supreme Court of California case of Moore v. Regents of the University of California. On July 9, 1990, the court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized."
No, the "intellectual property" term is absurd, not clean and simple. You cannot own a piece of data like you'd own a physical object. I'll pass the mike to RMS here.
Also you call developing a vaccine to cure Polio an exploitation? As far as I can tell from cursory reading of that article, this "exploitation" was hugely beneficial to society.
It most certainly is not your data. It's on their servers, in their apps, and running through their network. They decide what they do it with, how long they keep it, and whether or not you even have access to it. Comparing them to the post office doesn't really make sense either considering that's a public service, and one a depressingly large number of people want to get rid of. Google is a for profit company and their data is how they make money.
If you don't like that reality then don't use their service. It really is that simple.
Nope. My data is me. The totality of my data is literally my identity. If you know everything about me, you can steal my identity and assume my living role.
I don't like the reality of the US War Machine killing innocents simply to enrich crony war profiteers. By your reasoning, I should stop paying taxes too.
> By your reasoning, I should stop paying taxes too.
You can. Depending on how principled you are about thing like this. You'd still need to give up your American citizenship otherwise it doesn't matter where you live on the planet.
No it doesn't. That privacy policy is pretty clear that they won't share personal information without my consent, and I'm quite certain a court would agree.
Sure it make sense. The post office could do the same nasty things with your mail. But they don't, even though they could.
It's not because you can you should.
The USPS is only partially public. It is mostly a private company with a government influenced charter, which is the same basic structure as every corporation.
Emails are all about sender and receiver. Often only one participant is using a GMail address. Using email text for ad purposes is one thing, analyzing the email text where Google only acts as a carrier and using it for A.I. purposes is whole different thing.
email providers and all other providers need to have access only to encrypted data eventually, hopefully soon (to remove the temptation to use this valuable data...)
I should be able to use services from companies based on some terms and expect those terms to be respected.
You're basically saying I shouldn't expect any sort of fair treatment or rights from any service provider on the Internet. I don't want to play on your Internet.
Google does respect its terms. Their terms of service let them do whatever they want with your information, and they can update their terms at any time.
Google can (and does) change its terms without notice.
It's modestly better about this than many other SaaS / PaaS providers, but not by much.
I'm having a conversation at this moment with the chief architect of G+ over the G+/YouTube Anschluss in which the two services were integrated. I had separate accounts on each prior to this, repeatedly refused to combine accounts, and yet found them combined as of last November.
Worse: individual users have little or no recourse against such actions.
As for Gmail, as has been pointed out, parties not using Google directly have their private correspondence entered into Google's systems. And not just when emailing Gmail addresses, but many domains for which email is handled via Gmail.
Similar arguments could be made for many other online service providers as well. I don't consider Google to be significantly different from many of these, either for better or worse. But they're certainly a massive and major part of the problem, particularly for their size and scope.
Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen have made this point quite well, particularly in their December, 2013 Columbia Law School talk, and Schneier's April, 2014, Stanford Law School lecture.
