[dangelov]

> "I don't understand the concept of "opening up" an email"

You can look at it same way as you look at "opening a file". Similarly, "read" and "acquire" can also be thought of in a digital way, rather than analog and it's perfectly comparable in this context in my opinion. It's also true, they do "open", "read" and "acquire" contents, even if done by automated, digital means (programs, algos). Now whether that is or should be unlawful, I don't know.

[IanCal]

But the servers have to process the emails in some sense, they've got to read the headers for a start. They also must touch and process the body of the email. You simply cannot process emails without "opening them up", such a comparison makes absolutely no sense.

[dangelov]

You had mentioned that you don't understand the concept of "opening up mail". I was just making a point that it is in fact quite comparable (your analog vs digital argument).

In essence though, I don't disagree with you. It must be done for email to work at all.

"Acquiring" though, depending on how you interpret it, doesn't, unless we want spam prevention, custom filters, search etc, which obviously people are used to.

The bigger question is whether doing that to show ads is legal or not.

[IanCal]

I don't think "opening" applies at all, it suggests that they are somehow "closed" beforehand and they could be processed while keeping them closed. That's not the case.

> The bigger question is whether doing that to show ads is legal or not.

Yes, or possibly "do we want it to be legal?". We've not really been using this tech for that long, certainly not at this scale. It wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that we need clarification on what we want the laws to allow and forbid.

[Vivtek]

Given that the display is happening from Google's server, then clearly there is absolutely no way for that to work without Google opening the file!

It's richly bizarre that people have just today started to think about this process...

[Oletros]

> The bigger question is whether doing that to show ads is legal or not

What is the difference between "opening them" for full text search or spam filtering and "opening them" to use them for advertising?

[dangelov]

No difference in the opening. The difference is in what they do with the data, which is what I believe the lawsuit is about.

[Oletros]

If this is is what the lawsuit says: “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages”

There is no difference between opening for spam filtering from opening for ad serving