“Every bit of info it gets is gold.”

"Google attorneys argued in a California court Thursday that the company needs to systematically read every email sent through its mail system. Scanning email is simply part of the business."

“[Email] providers like Google must scan the emails sent to and from their systems as part of providing their services,” reads a supporting document filed by the Internet giant in the case. “The automated processes at issue are Google’s ordinary business practices implemented as part of providing the free Gmail service to the public.”

Privacy advocates beg to differ.

“They’re also collecting information about their users for other purposes,” Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court told FoxNews.com. He and other privacy advocates argue that e-mail scanning isn't technically necessary -- only fiscally.

“It’s not just for spam [filtering]. It’s clearly for advertising,” he said.

“Every bit of info it gets is gold.”

In a post about a study in potential deceptive texting, Professor William Jacobson, of Legal Insurrection, linked to an article that also embedded a TED Talk video, where I learned something interesting about email and lying.

Let's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones. Those are the conversations that really matter. What does technology do to deception with those folks?

Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days, and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium, and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media. And it really throws people for a loop because we think, well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more? The phone, in contrast, the most lies. Again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about. This tends to be very different from what people expect. 

The talk offers some clues as to why Google is so interested in scanning Google e-mail.

Here's is video After the jump