People who claim Gmail violates anti-wiretapping laws must pursue their claims individually instead of as a set.

Google on Tuesday won a meaningful victory in a legal conflict that threatens Gmail and the company’s data mining practices. US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., denied class-action status to plaintiffs who claim that Gmail’s automated content scanning violates state and federal anti-wiretapping statutes.

As a result, Gmail privacy claims will proceed individually, all alone merits. Not facing the possibility of an immense aggregated damage claim, Google could possibly reach settlements more easily or prevail outright.

The ruling is way more favorable than the only issued by Judge Koh last September, when she denied Google’s motion to dismiss the claims. Google argued that its automated processing of email content falls under allowed “ordinary process business” exemptions and that the plaintiffs consented.

The judge rejected the primary justification, saying Google must show its email interception was necessary for Gmail as opposed to for its broader business interests. She rejected the second one justification because she found Google’s privacy policies were unclear. She wrote, “an affordable Gmail user who read the Privacy Policies should not have necessarily understood that her emails were being intercepted to create user profiles or to offer targeted advertisements.”

Whether the plaintiffs consented to Gmail content scanning could be addressed because the individual cases proceed.

[Calling all wearable tech app developers: Google Launches Android Wear Developer Preview.]

Although a number of the plaintiffs are students who use Google Apps for Education, Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the law school’s High Tech Law Institute, said in a phone interview that this didn’t change the judge’s analysis. Attorneys for the plaintiffs sought to create a subclass of minors — who’ve greater privacy protections than adults — but were denied. Goldman says the judge is treating the entire plaintiffs the identical.

The legal doctrine at issue is the Electronics Communications Privacy Act, an amendment to the Wiretap Act that Goldman considers to be too vague and subject to interpretation. Disclosure requirements that wouldn’t be adequate under contract law might still satisfy the ECPA, in line with Goldman, who said Judge Koh’s ruling suggested that simply hearing about Google’s automated Gmail scanning at the radio might meet the ECPA consent standard.

Goldman argues that Koh’s ruling last year remains troubling since it calls into question any automated email processing. Underscoring the issue of interpreting the ECPA, Koh’s ruling that Gmail content scanning doesn’t fall under the law’s “ordinary process business” exemption conflicts with a December ruling in a separate Gmail case by US District Judge Paul S. Grewal.

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Thomas Claburn have been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications comparable to New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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