Announced last week, the service incorporates targeted ads into
incoming e-mail, following a computer scan of the message
content.
"This is not just 'buyer beware,'" Simon Davies, director of
Privacy International, told Reuters. "Consumers should be aware
that there's a vast violation of European law occurring here."
The group is among 28 privacy and civil liberties organisations
that today sent an open letter to Google founders Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, urging them to suspend the Gmail plans "until the
privacy issues are adequately addressed."
The letter also calls upon Google to clarify its written
information policies regarding data retention and data sharing
among its business units.
The 28 organisations voiced concerns about Google's plan to
automatically scan the text of all incoming messages for the
purposes of ad placement. They argue that the scanning of
confidential e-mail for inserting third party ad content "violates
the implicit trust of an e-mail service provider," that the
scanning "creates lower expectations of privacy in the e-mail
medium," and that it "may establish dangerous precedents."
Other concerns include the unlimited period for data retention
that Google's current policies allow, and the potential for
unintended secondary uses of the information Gmail will collect and
store.
Their concern that Gmail breaches the European Data Protection
Directive is based on consent. The Directive states that users'
consent must be informed, specific, and unambiguous. As it has been
proposed, and based on the current Gmail privacy policy, the letter
says the consent of EU-based Gmail users "cannot necessarily be
considered informed, specific, and unambiguous in regards to the
scanning, storage and further processing of their e-mails."
The letter says the need for informed, specific, and unambiguous
consent also applies to the potential linking of EU citizens'
e-mails to their search histories. It further speculates that
additional issues with data retention may also exist under the EU
Privacy Directive.
