Texas Sized Class Action Filed Against Google

A Texas man has filed a lawsuit against Google alleging that Google scans emails sent from non-Gmail users to Gmail account holders. The suit alleges that Google then sells the information, all with out the non-Gmail users’ consent. The Texan claims that violates the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The penalty for such a violation is $100 per day up to $10,000. That’s peanuts, until the potential class size is taken into account. According to some accounts, there are as many as 91.6 million Gmail users. Which makes the potential damages roughly a gazillion. This is just the beginning of the suit, so there is a long way to go, but it is one more example of the privacy battles that loom in the online world.