http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2 ... /15051241/
Once the fact was out, the internet giant tried to get a judge to help them hide it again.
Back in February, in a San Jose courtroom, a bombshell was dropped that could have been erased from the public record.
It turns out that Google, which bases its business on collecting and analyzing huge reams of data for advertising purposes, has been scanning users' emails even before users have a chance to open or read them, including email messages that are deleted without being opened. Google knows what's in your email before you do.
The revelation came in a now-settled legal dispute over Google's Gmail service. Dozens of the nation's largest newspapers and media companies fought to make sure that the case — and its wide-ranging implications for Internet users — received a full public airing. It has been an unfolding drama ever since, affecting what analysts estimate are 500 million Gmail users worldwide.
Google tried, and failed, to redact information about its email scanning process from a transcript of a public court hearing. Last month, the judge in the case ruled that portions of the transcript from that February hearing could not be redacted retroactively, since that would be tantamount to closing a public courtroom.
The company's attempt — akin to putting toothpaste back into a tube — was a reversal of its previous position in the lawsuit, a pledge that there would be a "fully public airing of the issues raised by plaintiffs' motion for class certification." The NSA recently used the very same tactic when it tried to secretly delete portions of a public court transcript in a lawsuit filed against its surveillance practices.
Within a matter of months, the company shrewdly moved the Content OneBox from Gmail's storage area to the "delivery pipeline" — meaning that it could now scan messages before they were received. As the plaintiffs explained:
"Google made a choice. They said, you know what, when people are accessing emails by an iPhone, we are not able to get their information. When people aren't opening their emails or they are deleting them, we are not able to get their information. When people are using Google Apps accounts where ads are disabled, we are not able to get that information. When people are accessing Gmail through some other email provider, we are not able to get that information. So what they did is they took a device that was in existence already and operating just fine back in the storage area, and they moved it to the delivery pipeline."