A Silicon Valley Business Journal report said Gmail users are suing Google Inc over email privacy violations purportedly done by the search giant over a five-year period. Pointing to a San Francisco Chronicle article, the class-action suit is seeking damages for anyone who had received or sent a Gmail message around that time, which could result to trillions of dollars in damages.
According Google's filing in a federal court in San Jose as noted by SF Gate, the search company argued that the case be dismissed on the grounds that it should not be facing one lawsuit that represents hundreds of millions of its Gmail users. Based on the class-action suit, it is demanding a $100 daily payout per user in accordance to the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Google's filing added, "(If the e-mail case gets group status, it would) indiscriminately amass together virtually everyone in the United States with a non-Gmail e-mail account, along with large groups of the over 400 million people who use Gmail and Google Apps."
US District Judge Lucy Koh, who had heard the case on Thursday, will also be handling complaints of a similar nature against Yahoo Inc. and LinkedIn Corp which were filed last year. She will need to determine whether the lawsuit will get group status in court, SF Gate said.
Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Hensler has been quoted by SF Gate that the plaintiffs will be facing a rough time proving that Google indeed had mined through user data in order to profit from them, pointing a fact that only 10% to 20% of all class-action suits are allowed to proceed to in court.
It is to note that in September of last year, Koh had turned down the search company's bid to dismiss the lawsuit, effectively rejecting Google's argument that Gmail users agreed to let their emails scanned under the service's terms and privacy policies.
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