14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo was hit with a lawsuit very similar to the one Google will have to fight in the coming months and years as well. Several non-Yahoo email users feel that the company scanning their messages to Yahoo addresses in order to display more relevant ads was a violation of their privacy.
This is what some Google and non-Google users argued in their lawsuit against the search giant, which a judge approved just a few days ago.
Yahoo, like Google and others, uses automated systems to "read" email messages and show ads that are relevant to the topic. No one at Yahoo actually sees those messages. Likewise, every email service that has some sort of spam filter will "read" messages. By the very nature of the service, email providers have the ability to store and display the messages.
But, in a lawsuit that is seeking class action status in the US, some are arguing that scanning the messages to show ads is a privacy violation, as GigaOM reports.
Google defended itself arguing that "reading" these messages was no different than what most other email services are already doing and that, by sending messages to a Gmail address, people understood that Google would be processing those messages and have access to them, relinquishing any expectation of total privacy.
Yahoo will likely make the same argument. The Google trial hasn't even started properly and the Yahoo lawsuit is even newer, so it will be a while before any of them are settled. Yahoo was actually hit with a similar lawsuit, but it got voluntarily dismissed earlier this year.
While there's plenty to be worried about when it comes to privacy in this day and age, being concerned that an automated system scans your messages, messages that are obviously accessible to the company you're sending them to or through, probably shouldn't be on the top of your list.