Four former and current University of California, Berkeley students have sued Google in federal court in San Jose, California, claiming that the company scanned their academic-affiliated Gmail accounts.
The plaintiffs allege that their Gmail accounts were scooped up, processed, and retained by the company for analytics, advertising, and tracking purposes from November 2010 until March 2014—in direct contrast to what their universities had told them previously. In April 2014, Google announced that it had ended the practice of scanning Google Apps for Education accounts.
The new lawsuit, known as Corley et al v. Google, alleges similar behavior across Gmail users at several universities nationwide, including San Diego State University and Yale University. Potentially, the case could affect tens of millions of students and former students nationwide.
As such, the suit argues, the court should find that Google violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and that each of the potential 30 million plaintiffs is owed “statutory damages of the greater of $10,000 [£7,000] or $100 [£70] for each day on which any violation occurred.”