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by IanCal 4663 days ago
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.
1 comments
dangelov 4663 days ago
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.

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IanCal 4663 days ago
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.

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Vivtek 4662 days ago
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...

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Oletros 4663 days ago
> 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?

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dangelov 4663 days ago
No difference in the opening. The difference is in what they do with the data, which is what I believe the lawsuit is about.
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Oletros 4663 days ago
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

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