Fornicalia Lawmaker Moves to Block Gmail

Gil Hamilton gil_hamilton at hotmail.com
Tue Apr 13 08:57:45 PDT 2004


Justin <justin-cypherpunks at soze.net> writes:
>Riad S. Wahby (2004-04-13 01:49Z) wrote:
>
> > 
>http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040412/wr_nm/tech_google_dc_1
> > > A private interaction between two consenting parties has absolutely
> > nothing to do with the state, period.  The bitch supporting this shit
> > should be removed from office forthwith.
>
>It's not just a private interaction between two consenting parties.
>It's a contract that grants power to a third party eliminating
>traditional legal guarantees of quasi-privacy in communication from
>sender to recipient, one of which is not a party to the contract.

No privacy is lost in the gmail system; no information about either
party is disclosed to any third party.  The information contained in the
message still remains private to the sender and recipient (well, to the
extent that any web-based mail can be considered "private").  Exactly
what "traditional legal guarantees" do you think would be lost in the
gmail system?

>There's no guarantee the average sender would know that mail to gmail is
>intercepted and parsed.

So what?  The average sender doesn't understand that mail is
"intercepted and parsed" by each SMTP or POP server encountered in the
path from sender to recipient.  Or that their message is written to the
hard disk of each of those systems as well.  What the average sender
understands is irrelevant unless there is some bearing on his
expectation of privacy in the message contents.

Really, what's the difference between scanning the message in order to,
say, render HTML tags it may contain, and scanning it in order to
generate targetted advertising based on keywords it contains?  The
latter could also be considered as merely part of the rendering process.

- GH

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