Google scans content of your Gmail messages

Tens of thousand of Gmail account holders in Ireland may be using the email service without realising the company routinely scans the content of their messages.

Google, which runs Gmail, has been praised for catching images of child abuse in an account holder’s email which has led to the arrest of a convicted sex offender in the US.

However, the company’s discovery has caued some disquiet over the fact that the internet giant is monitoring the communications of private individuals.

Google’s Irish office pointed out that the company had never made any secret of the fact that it checks emails. “We very openly disclose that we scan Gmail messages in our terms of service,” it said.

The terms of service state: “Our automated systems analyse your content [including emails]” but it says that this is done “to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

Under the company’s privacy policy, it states: “We will share personal information with companies, organisations or individuals outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary.”

In the case that came to light over the weekend, an automated scan is believed to have flagged illegal images of a young girl stored in a user’s Gmail account.

Google then notified to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and a police investigation followed, leading to the arrest in Texas.

Google said it could not comment on the specifics of an ongoing criminal investigation, or on any cases in Ireland it may have assisted with, but it stressed: “Google has legal obligations when it comes to child sexual abuse imagery.”

It is not possible for Google staff to manually view every email sent but scanning technology picks up certain types of content that could suggest criminality.

The same process uses sophisticated image matching technology developed by Microsoft that recognises ‘digital hashes’ or fingerprints applied to known images of abuse that are in circulation.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt admitted late last year that the process was imperfect. “There’s no quick technical fix when it comes to detecting child sexual abuse imagery,” he wrote.

“This is because computers can’t reliably distinguish between innocent pictures of kids at bathtime and genuine abuse. So we always need to have a person review the images. Once that is done — and we know the pictures are illegal — each image is given a unique digital fingerprint.”