Here is an article from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28639628
Although its good a guy like this was caught, what does this mean for the everyone else?
I'm interested to see what people think about this.
It is good that he was caught. However, I do believe that privacy is an inalienable right. Google abuses it's position in the chain of information.
This occurred after a class-action lawsuit against the company over email scanning was dismissed earlier this year. At the time, Google said that "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties".
Nobody in the postal service can open, or tamper with, mail that does not belong to them. Yet, Google gets to look through your mail, because you are using their service. They say the system is automated, but I expect it to get abused. If you're against NSA spying, you should be against this, in my opinion. They've got no right to inspect our private life. In the quote above, it sounds like they are trying to dictate law: "No expectation of privacy".
Sorry, Google. You have to comply with laws, put in place, through our wonderful democratic process. People want their privacy. Though, I will concede, information voluntarily placed on something like Facebook, you shouldn't expect any privacy. But this is fucking emails! Emails are not intended for the public sphere, usually. It's for the writer and the recipient to decide that.
In this advanced, technological age, I think we need to keep the laws up-to-date. I will accept a few arbitrary ads, if that's the consequence of not allowing Google to target me with specific ads!
Damn, better stop sending dick picks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7520941/Budget-2010-HMRC-officers-to-get-powers-to-open-peoples-post-without-asking-permission.html
dunno if you saw this...
That's it. I give up. Time to get off the internet and take up subsistence farming, with a solar powered house. Or just live in a Tibetan hamlet, eating shoots.
wow, that's hardcore.
Lucky me, created youtube account when it was still "you"tube and they didn't demand phone number at this time (and still don't want it ??). Well, for the last few years google became so nosy and annoying that i am not using any other of their services than youtube (never had any real data on they servers though). Not saying that their apps are bad or anything like that, just wondering if teenagers these days even know or understand what is a privacy ? Whenever the technology creates a possibility to abuse it or use it for own purposes you can be sure that the government and big corporations are using/abusing it right now (illegally, unofficially, years later stating that "it was necessary for public safety at the time")
That is pretty disturbing.
They probably don't need to ask you for your phone number any more :)
At least you can often tell whether you mail had been tempered with.
Didn't expect any privacy from gmail. They datamine that stuff and sell the data. They also work with just about any government that takes an interest.
I'm surprised that they only found one picture of a naked girl among the hundreds of millions of gmail accounts. I would've expected something like a crackdown on a US pedo-ring with 30k arrests or something.
The troubling bit is that although the photo was found using an algorithm, a long chain of people had to have a look to verify the find. And there must be lots of false positives too. Private pictures of naked girls who are technically 18, but look underage. There's real people sitting somewhere, sifting through those and verifying the ages and names of people in them.
The fact that google scans your emails is not news.
Staying the hell away from an entity that exists by gathering and selling information should be common sense by now.