Can Google employees read your emails? It’s a serious question posted by labnol.org. I have been thinking about this for quite sometime, at least from the day when Google revealed that its bot scans the content of the email to display the relevant advertisement. Google Bots are spiders that crawl the mail that are currently viewed by the user to identify spam mails and also to decide the kind of advertisement to be displayed. Here, the Google Bots are programs, but the real concern is while an employee of Google has an access to your emails!
According to the post by Christopher Cuong Nguyen (on Quora.com), the answer could be “YES”. Here is the snippet of it,
A small number of GMail-related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata. The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.
So the risk is never zero, but minimized by the factors above.
But here is what Microsoft feels about the issue, the GMAIL MAN!
Email privacy? Then the risk is never zero!
