890 College Students Sue Google Over Email Scanning

Megalith

Megalith

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Wait, you mean to tell me that companies might have an ulterior motive for giving out free software and services? Unfortunately for the students, the courts seem more concerned about not being able to make the most out of court fees.

Hundreds of U.S. college students and alumni in 21 states joined the original lawsuit filed in January by the four Berkeley students. On April 29, another 180 filed a separate lawsuit making the same claim: that Google's Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes. Google did not respond to requests for comment.
 
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If they sue then should they sue Google or should they sue the university for choosing Google?

Personally I think a public university should have standards of ethics when choosing an outside company. If they had simply tried, they must have had an opportunity to find a great company that did not happen to be Google.
 
Unfortunately I think almost all email services do this. I'm pretty sure comcast does this as well and I pay for this shit. It's like paying for ads in tv. If it weren't for adblock, I'd have ads in my email as well when I access it not from a client. Trash.
 
the_servicer said:
If they sue then should they sue Google or should they sue the university for choosing Google?

Personally I think a public university should have standards of ethics when choosing an outside company. If they had simply tried, they must have had an opportunity to find a great company that did not happen to be Google.
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Public universities need to have standards of value too and Google's service was no doubt free or very low-cost.
 
GaryJohnson said:
Public universities need to have standards of value too and Google's service was no doubt free or very low-cost.
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Mr. Governor sir, these young children do not understand that something can't be free. They have not grown up in a world where "sustainable" was ever a bullet point on the presentation. They also believe that given the opportunity, all humans will try to do the right thing....especially in regards to other humans. They are innocent, but they are susceptible.
 
It should be noted that there are some really great mail hosts out there that are not expensive. Many are small businesses that specialize in just one thing and some have been going strong for a long time. For anyone who uses email it is truly an international buyer's market. How can people afford to drop stacks on Netflix and Google Play junk but not spend pennies (literally $0.84/month) on high quality email service?
bboynitrous said:
Unfortunately I think almost all email services do this. I'm pretty sure comcast does this as well and I pay for this shit. It's like paying for ads in tv. If it weren't for adblock, I'd have ads in my email as well when I access it not from a client. Trash.
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the_servicer said:
It should be noted that there are some really great mail hosts out there that are not expensive. Many are small businesses that specialize in just one thing and some have been going strong for a long time. For anyone who uses email it is truly an international buyer's market. How can people afford to drop stacks on Netflix and Google Play junk but not spend pennies (literally $0.84/month) on high quality email service?
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Also you can own your own server (domain) and you get an email server as a side benefit. I can tell you I have NEVER got any spam mail on my email addresses I have set up and not provided to other companies. I pay like $60 a year and can host my own stuff and get my own email. Don't have to worry about my things getting broken links over time.
 
There is a bit of misunderstanding in some of these postings. Google failed to tell the students and school they were scanning the mail and when asked directly only responded that they were not advertising. Federal law dictates you must inform someone you are scooping the information and failure to do so is a $10,000 fine. So, yes it was free, but when asked how they were paying for it Google refused to inform the users or schools. This could even get more serious for Google if they were "donating" these educational services and taking tax incentives, in which case it would be a lot more than a slap on the wrist.
 
If you need a personal e-mail, sometimes it's better just to buy a domain name. Some of the domain registrars offer you e-mail if you buy a domain, and an e-mail server for a domain name isn't that expensive. It's probably the most secure option.
 
athenian200 said:
If you need a personal e-mail, sometimes it's better just to buy a domain name. Some of the domain registrars offer you e-mail if you buy a domain, and an e-mail server for a domain name isn't that expensive. It's probably the most secure option.
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I don't know how this relates to the lawsuit. What are you getting at here?
 
LightningCrash said:
I don't know how this relates to the lawsuit. What are you getting at here?
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Oh, just that a lot of people rely on GMail and other free services, even though they get scanned by the hosting provider on a regular basis and have potential security problems. I got mentally sidetracked from the lawsuit while I was reading the comments and started thinking about Google scanning people's e-mail in general.

Regarding the lawsuit, Google shouldn't be treating private business accounts like GMail accounts if they want people to use their services for anything other than just free e-mail. But also, Universities are paid so much for education that they should be running a private e-mail system rather than letting their entire e-mail infrastructure get out of their own hands like this. It's not like they're running some small business here. I'm not really sure why more anger is being directed at Google than at the universities, but either would be an acceptable target for it.

I would think the universities should take some flack for forcing students to put their e-mails in Google's hands and encouraging them to trust that platform.
 
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athenian200 said:
Oh, just that a lot of people rely on GMail and other free services, even though they get scanned by the hosting provider on a regular basis and have potential security problems. I got mentally sidetracked from the lawsuit while I was reading the comments and started thinking about Google scanning people's e-mail in general.

Regarding the lawsuit, Google shouldn't be treating private business accounts like GMail accounts if they want people to use their services for anything other than just free e-mail. But also, Universities are paid so much for education that they should be running a private e-mail system rather than letting their entire e-mail infrastructure get out of their own hands like this. It's not like they're running some small business here. I'm not really sure why more anger is being directed at Google than at the universities, but either would be an acceptable target for it.

I would think the universities should take some flack for forcing students to put their e-mails in Google's hands and encouraging them to trust that platform.
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It's not just email. The Google Apps for Education thing is a pretty big platform with federated identity services and unlimited Drive storage.

Universities are putting a lot of their stack into Google, beyond email.
 
LightningCrash said:
It's not just email. The Google Apps for Education thing is a pretty big platform with federated identity services and unlimited Drive storage.

Universities are putting a lot of their stack into Google, beyond email.
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That's really terrible that they're trusting a private company like Google that's known to do this kind of datamining to handle their student information appropriately, especially after all this. This could end up being a violation of FERPA somehow...

It's funny, I was so freaked out by Apple having too much control that I didn't even see how powerful Google was getting until it started getting creepy. They really have their hands in a lot of stuff now, to the point that they could probably single-handedly cripple entire industries or countries if they wanted.
 
EchtoGammut said:
There is a bit of misunderstanding in some of these postings. Google failed to tell the students and school they were scanning the mail and when asked directly only responded that they were not advertising. ....
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Google is under no obligation to the individual students and school staff.
The university is provided with the EULA when they sign up of this. If the university's IT staff were unaware of what Google does with people's information, that's not Google's fault.
 
the_servicer said:
Mail hosting from a big tech vampire like Google might be cheaper, but how much cheaper?
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Free.
Gmail, Google docs, Google drive, calendar and a number of other services at no cost.
As stated earlier in this discussion, there are a lot of schools that find this very attractive.
It's not just universities and colleges, either. Small primary and secondary school districts with little or no IT budget find this hard to pass up.
 
the_servicer said:
It should be noted that there are some really great mail hosts out there that are not expensive. Many are small businesses that specialize in just one thing and some have been going strong for a long time. For anyone who uses email it is truly an international buyer's market. How can people afford to drop stacks on Netflix and Google Play junk but not spend pennies (literally $0.84/month) on high quality email service?
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Have any recommendations?

I have gmail, hotmail, live and yahoo all for junk mail/sign up reasons, but have been looking for something good for personal. I had been using work email (exchange) for most actual communication but am wanting to get my own private email setup. Most people I talk to suggest getting a domain/website and using that, but I really want something simple, and I don't want to manage or setup.
 
It sounds like you're looking for the easiest, which probably means having a domain name like (hotmail.com or gmail.com) provided for you. Runbox and FastMail have each worked well for me. There might be others but those two jump to mind. Another option might be mxroute.xyz. But that one might take more work to get a new user signed up.
BlueFireIce said:
Have any recommendations?
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the_servicer said:
It sounds like you're looking for the easiest, which probably means having a domain name like (hotmail.com or gmail.com) provided for you. Runbox and FastMail have each worked well for me. There might be others but those two jump to mind. Another option might be mxroute.xyz. But that one might take more work to get a new user signed up.
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I was debating between Hushmail and Runbox.
 
gathagan said:
Free.
Gmail, Google docs, Google drive, calendar and a number of other services at no cost.
As stated earlier in this discussion, there are a lot of schools that find this very attractive.
It's not just universities and colleges, either. Small primary and secondary school districts with little or no IT budget find this hard to pass up.
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But Office 365 is also free to education, and it includes offline copies of office for every student.
and Microsoft doesn't scan, profile, or advertise to student accounts.
and Microsoft will allow you to negotiate your contracts to maintain compliance with FERPA and all your internal policies that might go beyond FERPA.
and Microsoft will allow institutions to geographically isolate their data so it won't cross international boundaries when "in the cloud" so the institution can know for sure which laws apply to that data.
and Microsoft will further indemnify the institution in the event there is ever a legal challenge (like the one Google is facing here).

None of the higher education institutions, and none of the public school districts, in my city have GAFE accounts. They are ALL Office 365, and most of them cite these very reasons for their choice.
It's baffling that any schools would choose differently.
 
Ordeith said:
But Office 365 is also free to education, and it includes offline copies of office for every student.
and Microsoft doesn't scan, profile, or advertise to student accounts.
and Microsoft will allow you to negotiate your contracts to maintain compliance with FERPA and all your internal policies that might go beyond FERPA.
and Microsoft will allow institutions to geographically isolate their data so it won't cross international boundaries when "in the cloud" so the institution can know for sure which laws apply to that data.
and Microsoft will further indemnify the institution in the event there is ever a legal challenge (like the one Google is facing here).

None of the higher education institutions, and none of the public school districts, in my city have GAFE accounts. They are ALL Office 365, and most of them cite these very reasons for their choice.
It's baffling that any schools would choose differently.
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Microsoft isn't perfect, but I trust them more than Google these days. The schools I go to all use Office 365 now, just moved off of their own private stuff a couple years ago. Doesn't bother me because I'm already using Bing and Windows Phone. Also ties in well with the Exchange servers used by many workplaces. Trying to avoid both Apple and Google services, and Microsoft is really the only alternative. They seem like the best out of the three.
 
If anyone is following along, I guess mxroute.xyz is now mxroute.io
BlueFireIce said:
Because Kyle is a dirty perv who likes reading your email.
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I don't claim to know what's going on, but I suspect they blocked runbox a long time ago when abuse from their main domain name was a much bigger problem than it is now.
 
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