State Senator Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from the Bay Area city of Fremont, said on Thursday that it should be illegal for a company to scan the text of its customers' email correspondence and display relevant advertising -- even if customers explicitly agree to the practice in exchange for a gigabyte of storage.
"Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers and family members are just another direct-marketing commodity isn't the way to promote e-commerce," Figueroa said in a statement, which called Gmail customers' correspondence "a direct-marketing opportunity for Google."
Google has encountered unexpectedly severe criticism from advocates of more government regulation to control private companies' business practices. London-based Privacy International has fired off complaints to government officials in at least 16 nations. Meanwhile, a coalition of proregulatory privacy groups wrote a letter to Google, saying it "must" abandon plans to introduce Gmail in its current form. Less regulatory-focused groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, did not sign that letter.
Figueroa's bill says an email or instant-messaging provider can scan outgoing messages from its users, but not incoming ones. It includes a narrow exception for spam and virus filtering.
A Google representative said the company is reviewing the legislation and did not have an immediate response.
Figueroa's proposal would do far more than merely block the forthcoming Gmail service, which is not yet available to the public.
Her broadly written bill says no email or IM provider may "review, examine or otherwise evaluate the content of incoming email or instant message" originating from outside the system without the explicit permission of all outside correspondents, a difficult requirement to meet in practice.
That would make it illegal for a California technology company to offer a "family friendly" email service that discards messages with sexually explicit jokes, for instance. It would also prohibit reviewing incoming messages to make clickable hyperlinks out of text phrases like "www.news.com."
"It's OK to read people's email, if you're trying to fight spam, but it's not OK if you want to show them ads," said Sonia Arrison, director of technology policy at the free-market Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. "It's not about privacy. It's about hating corporate America."
Figueroa's office acknowledged that there were problems with the bill but predicted that they could be resolved during negotiations in the legislature. A hearing is scheduled before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 4 May.
Talkback
As the GMail site states that advert will be generated based on emails and that "No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers".
I don't have real problem with this, if people can be bothered to read the Privacy Policy and about pages (and i'm guessing the license agreement you have to accept during signup) before joining such a website then what ground can people have to say "they are checking my email", it's all there black and white, clear as day, if you don't like it don't sign up join hotmail instead.
I'd much rather have advert that interrest me than hotmails generic ads. If a standard web-based email system scans your mail for spam (hotmail, yahoo) then what is the difference with getting tailored adverts based on that same information?
Yeah, lets make scanning email illegal - that won't completely remove spam blocking capabilities.
"Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers and family members are just another direct-marketing commodity isn't the way to promote e-commerce,"
IMHO... Shouldn't we be educating people that sending sensitive information in unencrypted emails is the same as writing it on a postcard, damned if i'd send an email to my doctor from any freebie email account, whether they scan my messages or not!
i'm predicting the bill will fail. most consumers would trade a little privacy for 1GB of storage for their mail. what is the problem with presenting me with advertisements? it's not spam, it's tailored to the context of my emails, and no human reads it. i can hardly see the problem. after all, every time you send an email out, bits and pieces of it get stored all over the internet on hundreds of servers. the senator does not seem to appreciate that gmail is no worse than normal email when it comes to privacy.
still, the bill is important to keep companies on the line. in my view though, google has made a wonderful compromise.
I don't care for the relevant text ads, I just want the storage space and an e-mail account. They can add stuff to my e-mail, I don't care because I don't share personnal information by e-mail.
Wot's da matta, babe? You got enough fruitloops in California that NEED legislation to stop them from abusing themselves. Just put forth a law that none of those perverts should talk dirty on Gmail. See? Then let the rest of the USA alone. Gaaaahhhhh!
Gmail sounds cool, this is just a stupid thing that people are doing. grr, silly calafornians
The funniest part is that as recent google results show, their results are so far off - I can't wait to see what the ads are about.
For instance, someone sighing off with 'John, Ireland' will get 'Download a song from this artist at real.com.
Heh, funny if John in Ireland is an advocate for purely physical sales of MP3's...heh.
Or, Dear John - sending an email to a friend at Massey Ferguson results in a John Deere dealers (www.fredhaar.com) ad plastered on your email. Funny.