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Ariella
10/6/2016 2:24:08 PM
User Rank Author
Re: trending
@mhhf1ve you mean if it's not seen by human eyes, privacy is maintained? Interesting point, though I'd think that any emails that were flagged by the algorithm must have been passed on to human readers in this instance. According to the article, though, all data transfers are scanned in a machine way to prevent child pornography from getting through the channels.
mhhf1ve
10/6/2016 2:45:05 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: trending
That's what I mean.. if an algorithm scans your email and doesn't find what it's looking for... has your privacy been violated?
Ariella
10/6/2016 3:01:54 PM
User Rank Author
Re: trending
@mhhf1ve excellent question. Perhaps not, though it seems that to act on the flags, at least some will have to be read by humans. Looking further into this, I came across a company that offers an email filter service to try to identify employees that may be disgruntled enough to engineer a data leak. It's called Scout, In a Fortune article, the company founder explained how it complies with US law:
He stresses that only a tiny fraction of emails are ever read, and most of those are reviewed only by the outside clinician—never coming to the attention of co-workers or supervisors. From a legal standpoint, Weber explains, in the U.S. a company needs "informed consent" to look at employees' emails. "If you have a policy that informs your employees that it's not their computer, it's not their data, it's subject to search, there's no expectation of privacy—you're covered," he says. (Most large U.S. companies already have such policies in place.)
mhhf1ve
10/6/2016 5:04:08 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: trending
Scanning employee email has far fewer restrictions because employees do not (or should not) have an expectation of privacy while using work email. Since no one reads terms of service agreements-- Yahoo might not have done anything legally wrong either if their TOS has similar clauses of allowing filtering and other algorithmic targeting. (They must if email ads are targeted at all?)
Ariella
10/6/2016 5:07:36 PM
User Rank Author
Re: trending
@mhhf1ve Yahoo had been linked to email scanning for ads. Yahoo settled that class action lawsuite at the beginning of the year. See https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/01/14/yahoo-settles-class-action-suit-over-scanning-email-for-ad-targeting/ It says;
Yahoo has settled a class action lawsuit over automatically scanning email sent by non-Yahoo Mail customers – including attachments – without consent, in order to deliver targeted ads to Mail users.
The upshot: Yahoo's going to keep scanning email, but it's tweaking the timing so that it scans only after the email has reached a user's inbox.
mhhf1ve
10/6/2016 8:28:12 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: trending
Nice link. Hadn't seen that lawsuit, and it seems relevant for any future email scanning suits against yahoo. Settling doesn't quite set a precedent, but it shows that yahoo might be able to buy its way out of some email missteps.
Ariella
10/6/2016 8:41:54 PM
User Rank Author
Re: trending
@mhhf1ve I think that companies tend to settle. Google is expected to offer a settlement over the charge that it used its Apps for Education to scan student emails for marketing purposes. See http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/08/19/settlement-likely-in-google-email-case.htm That also brings up the consideration people have to take into account of variations among states about data protection. That story refers to the California Wiretap law, which, apparently is extended to emails.
JohnBarnes
10/7/2016 7:41:19 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: trending
mhhf1ve,
If I set up a hidden camera in your shower, and can't find a buyer for the pictures, has your privacy been violated?
Re: trending
@mhh: I'm with John on this point. Auto-finding an absence of a particular item is still learning information about communications.
mhhf1ve
10/7/2016 4:00:10 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: trending
JohnBarnes, That's not exactly an appropriate analogy...
Have you ever used an email spam filter? Yes? Has that spam filter ever misfired and categorized a legit email for you as spam? Did you feel like your privacy had been violated?
Now what if that mis-identified email was from your doctor and contained a graphic picture of a recent surgery? Has your privacy been violated? Perhaps? Maybe not? No human actually saw your email in this case, but if this spam filter had instead been set up to re-direct spam to some facility where human beings inspected all the email categorized as spam to ensure algorithmic accuracy... Then there'd be a better argument for a privacy violation.
But what if the algorithm never detected any spam.. and never sent any of your email to this quality control facility? Would your privacy still be intact?
I don't like the idea that a state agency can sift through everyone's emails, but the scale of this problem is unknown. And it's not as clear to me that Yahoo is the bad agent in this situation. It's really the government that should shoulder the blame for requesting companies to spy on users. Companies are under some duress to comply. Maybe we should praise the companies that publicly fight back, but is vilifying the companies that comply completely justified? Yahoo did NOT set up a secret camera in anyone's shower. Perhaps Yahoo just handed over an email-wiretapping ability to a state agency, just like AT&T and Verizon and other telcos have done in the past (and with built-in legal protections for doing so). What are telcos and companies like Yahoo supposed to do? Even Apple has complied with government requests, so there aren't many companies that would risk their existence to protect users from government surveillance.
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