Author: Silicon Valley Sleuthhound

At last, the truth is starting to seep out of Mountain View:

In a stunning admission contained in a brief filed recently in federal court, lawyers for Google said people should not expect privacy when they send messages to a Gmail account. Consumer Watchdog said today that people who care about their email correspondents’ privacy should not use the Internet giant’s service.

Google’s brief said: “Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient’s [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, ‘a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.’”  (Motion to dismiss, Page 19)

Consumer Watchdog has posted the motion to dismiss in its entirety here.

The admission is stunning in the sense that it contradicts the facade on privacy Google has long tried to publicly maintain. Worker bees at Google have tried to paper over statements by the likes of Eric Schmidt about the company policy being to get “right up to the creepy line” but not cross it. Google claims users are always free to leave, and it has a project called the Data Liberation Front, which is intended to facilitate allowing Google users to take their data somewhere else if they choose.

In response to Consumer Watchdog’s unveiling of the court filing, Google said:

We take our users’ privacy and security very seriously; recent reports claiming otherwise are simply untrue. We have built industry-leading security and privacy features into Gmail — and no matter who sends an email to a Gmail user, those protections apply.

Sure. And we here at LGB always take Google at their word!

Seriously, though, if that’s the case, what’s with the court filing then? As John Simpson says:

“If they take privacy seriously, then they must amend their brief and stop reading and analyzing the content of email we send to their system,” said Simpson.  “If Google stands by the claim of no expectation of privacy it asserted in the court filing, they cannot claim to respect users’ privacy. These two claims are obviously incompatible.”

Or are they? Google is such a behemoth now that perhaps the legal department isn’t always acting in concert with the public relations and marketing division. It certainly appears that the position Google has taken in court was not one that the marketing division is comfortable representing to the public. And no wonder: it undermines all the false and misleading claims Google has made over the years about user privacy in its offerings, Gmail included.

Everything shall be indexed! Quoting from an announcement made today by Google:

Ever had trouble checking your flight’s status on the go because it meant digging through your email for the flight number? Or wanted to just quickly see whether your package would arrive on time, without having to look up the tracking info first? You’ve told us it would be much easier if you could skip the fuss and just ask Google.

Soon you’ll be able to find this info instantly in Google Search if it’s in your Gmail, Google Calendar or Google+. For example, just ask or type, “What’s my flight status?” or “When will my package arrive”?

Over the next several days, we’ll be rolling this out to all U.S., English-speaking users on desktop, tablet and smartphone, with voice search (so you don’t have to type).

The announcement should have – but did not – go on to say: And we won’t ask your permission, either. We’re just going to do it, because that’s how we roll here at Google. Your privacy is not important to us. Your data is. At Google, we view *you* and your personal information as our most important asset, and we are constantly working to monetize *you* so we can bolster our bottom line. Ain’t data mining grand? Think about all the money we can make with your cooperation!

We foresaw this kind of integration by default across Google’s offerings years ago. Google claims, of course, that this is a “pro-user” change. But they’re really just offering up excuses for imposing new defaults on everyone. If you don’t like personalized search, you have to opt out or sign out, because if you do nothing and you have a Google account, the Big G will mine your data to its heart’s content.

 

Google executives have publicly admitted on a couple of occasions that they have held back from introducing facial recognition technology into the Monster of Mountain View’s products, presumably because doing so would be an embarrassingly obvious jump over “creepy line” former CEO Eric Schmidt says the company avoids trying to cross (in order to prevent there from being a big public and regulatory backlash against Google). But that hardly means the company isn’t working on developing extremely invasive technologies behind the scenes, as this update from CNET shows:

Google is close to completing its deal to buy Viewdle, a Ukrainian maker of facial recognition technology that automatically tags photos, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The acquisition, which has been in the works for more than a year, is expected to close this week, the person said.

Representatives from Google and Viewdle declined to comment.

The move makes sense for Google because Viewdle’s technology provides a way for users of Google+, Android, Picasa, and other services on a range of devices to easily (even, automatically) tag photos of friends. Viewdle’s SocialCamera app automatically tags Facebook friends and the company has released an Android game called Third Eye.

Facebook also has made a play in this space, earlier this year buying Face.com along with its Photo Tagger auto-tagging app.

The reason Google and Facebook are so interested in facial recognition technology is that they want to be able to add faces to their rapidly growing databases, which contain profiles of millions of people. The companies already have access to a treasure trove of sensitive information, including names, phone numbers, addresses, credit cards, interests, relationships, and so forth. But they want more. The ability to associate photos of people with their profiles could be very lucrative.