Fast Forward Newsletter
Google Gets More Gmail Guff
The privacy concerns over Google's planned Gmail service won't die. More than two dozen privacy groups write a letter to the company to ask it to reconsider its plan to scan people's e-mails.
Twenty-eight privacy and civil liberties groups sent an open letter to Google on Wednesday urging the company to reconsider its plans for a free e-mail program that would scan the content of incoming e-mail and seed it with targeted ads.
The groups want Google to suspend its proposed Gmail plan until the company has adequately addressed privacy concerns raised last week when the company announced the program.
The letter, sent to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, expressed concern that the scanning of confidential e-mail for the purpose of inserting ads "violates the implicit trust of an e-mail service provider" and sets a dangerous precedent for reduced expectations of privacy in e-mail.
The groups also want Google to clarify how long it intends to retain an account holder's e-mail on its servers. Google has said that e-mail could remain in storage even after an account holder deletes mail or cancels an e-mail account. The groups also want Google to guarantee in writing that it won't meld data scanned from e-mail with other information it gathers about people who use its search engine.
Signatories to the letter included directors of the World Privacy Forum, Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Foundation for Information Policy Research.
The groups expressed concern that the infrastructure Google is creating could be replicated by other companies and used for unseemly purposes. While Google may not currently plan to meld data taken from e-mails, other companies "may have very different ideas about data correlation than Google does, and may have different motivations for scanning" the body of e-mail messages, the letter said.
The groups also warned that law enforcement agencies may want to take advantage of the scanning to demand that Google -- or other companies offering similar services -- help them single out e-mail users based on the content of their correspondence.
A Google spokesman said the company is reviewing the letter.