[wfunction]

Is violating a contract a crime?

And what's the privacy issue with indexing, and heck, still showing ads? As long as they're not sharing your data, where is your privacy being violated by indexing and being shown ads when they already have the same data? That makes no sense.

[pikzen]

Violating a contract is a breach of the civil code in my country, exposing you to financial compensation. It is very similar in the rest of the EU. So while not a crime, thankfully some countries still take that seriously.

The issue is "fuck you, I am paying you to use your service without having you getting your greedy paws on my data." If they start indexing data from actual customers, then they're reading it. That's a breach of privacy and contract, plain and simple. And at that point, well, you might as well not pay for their service if it doesn't bring you anything more than a free tier plan.

If I'm paying you to keep my private journal safe yet accessible, you bet I'm going to be pissed if you start telling me at which page something is. Maybe you just remembered a content -> page mapping, but you still read my damn private journal.

[wfunction]

I was bringing up the contract issue somewhat separately to point out that it's not a criminal issue like the parent claimed, as far as I know. I wasn't saying breaching your contract is OK, sorry if that was confusing.

My main beef is with what we do and don't call a privacy violation. If your issue was that use of your information or identity by someone else (especially to make money) entitled your to fair compensation (or otherwise it shouldn't be done simply because of unfairness), I would agree with you. If your claim was that a PERSON (or their machine) obtaining any new information about you is a privacy violation, I would get that too. But you're claiming a machine that can violate your privacy merely by indexing and displaying things back to YOURSELF that it already knew. That makes no sense to me. No one is gaining any extra information about you when a computer indexes information it already has, so while it might be unfair, it simply cannot be a privacy violation.