State Senate Expected to OK E-Mail Bill
SACRAMENTO — E-mail service providers would not be allowed to glean details from people’s electronic messages to compile dossiers useful for marketing under a bill expected to pass the state Senate today.
A modified version of the legislation, authored by state Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont), would no longer require providers to get the consent from authors of e-mail before searching through messages.
That prohibition could have hamstrung Google Inc.’s upcoming e-mail service, called Gmail, which is designed to use such pieces of information to select appealing advertising and display it with the e-mails.
Gmail is being widely anticipated both because of new technology it employs to provide users with a larger cache of memory and because Google’s owners are preparing to take the company public in what is expected to be Silicon Valley’s biggest initial public stock offering in years.
Though instantaneous scanning of e-mails is no longer banned in the legislation, privacy advocates have requested Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer determine whether such examinations violate wiretap privacy laws, which make it illegal to intercept conversations without the consent of the parties involved.
Lockyer has yet to make a determination, a spokesman said.
The revised version of SB 1822 would forbid service providers from retaining any of the information they find in personal e-mails.
It also would ban humans from looking at the information, leaving it only to computer programs that would scan through messages seeking clues for what kind of advertising might appeal to the e-mail recipients.
The legislation also would require that providers remove all traces of deleted e-mails.
Executives of Google, which had opposed the original legislation, did not respond to requests for comment, but Figueroa’s office said the company had agreed to the changes.
“E-mails are like telephone conversations: They’re intimate,” she said.
“This will set new standards, the first in the nation for e-mail users.”
Privacy advocates said they supported the revised version of the bill, which will go to the Assembly upon Senate passage.
“We liked the original version, but apparently that wasn’t going to fly” on the Senate floor, said Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearing House, a nonprofit organization in San Diego.
