> They do that only for the purpose of delivering the mail safely. Not to further their own arbitrary business interests.

Intent is irrelevant, if one is wiretapping then the other is also wiretapping

Where do you get the idea that intent is irrelevant? That's certainly not a general legal principle.

what? no, almost everything I mentioned do it to further their own business interests.

Mostly by offering value to their customers in the form of added services.

Google do it to allow themselves to provide a free email service.

Without the scanning of email done by google, everyone would have to pay for their email services.

You may or may not like the trade off, but apparently MANY people would prefer to have a free email service that provides advertising over a paid for email service that does not.

> Without the scanning of email done by google, everyone would have to pay for their email services.

On reflection I think that would be a good thing.

At present > 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Thousands of staff are involved in designing and implementing 'improved' advertising systems. Millions of hours are consumed by this every year.

If Google was forced to transition to a subscription service for Gmail it might force a general shift in their revenue model. I contend all that brain power could be redeployed to doing amazing things, rather than refining AdWords .

maybe, but whether or not their business model is good for mankind, is really not the topic of discussion here...

If you read the article, you will learn that the issue is that users were not made aware of the tradeoff.

This argument has already been rejected by the judge. Wiretappimg doesn't suddenly become permissible just because it permits an arbitrary business model that happens to pay for the service.

If we say analyzing your communication is ok as long as it makes money for the service provider and the service is free, we open a Pandora's box. Google (and anyone operating an SMTP server) would be able to sell HR reports to recruiters, insurability scores to insurers, predictions of criminality to police departments, infidelity scores to private detectives, etc. Advertising is not a specially protected business model.

if we say it is not ok, then it is not possible to have technology that looks at the content of email for delivery purposes. thus virus checkers, deep packet inspection and firewalls instantly become unavailable.