RNC sues Google over email spam filters
Taken from the Associated Press, a copy of the suit filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia says the case centers on the “massive volume” of emails from Gmail users that Google failed to block.
The lawsuit also alleges that Google manipulated results in searches that suggested to some recipients that a recipient was trying to communicate with a spammer or other scammer.
Google said in a statement that it takes its responsibility to protect its users “very seriously” and believes it has done so.
“These are a few innocent users that were misdirected by Google’s spam filters. While Google’s spam filters are working as designed today, we are sorry that Google’s spam filters were misused in this way,” the company said.
A Google spokesman also said that the company did not allow spam messages into Gmail. In the past, Google has argued that it does not take responsibility if a Google-owned email service is used to distribute spam, because spam messages are not actually sent by the sender but instead appear to be sent by the recipient.
“We have to assume that the sender is a robot, and we can’t actually know for sure,” Jon LeFevor, a policy manager at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the AP.
Google also said that it does not monitor recipient messages after they are delivered to Gmail, and that it does not track any information about the recipients’ identities, “including whether they use different email providers or other service providers.”
If the users who received the messages don’t want them taken down, the case could run for years, even if the spam filters are ruled not to have been properly implemented, said James Grimmelmann, a technology expert and professor at the University of Southern California.
“It takes about three cases to change something,” Grimmelmann told the AP. “If it takes all three cases to change things, eventually, things are going to change.”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said in a statement