Several sites reported on Tuesday that Google believed Gmail users had no expectation of privacy in the context of their emails.

The alarming stories referred to a legal brief (embedded below) in which Google's lawyers supposedly made the unsettling argument. But the stories — with headlines like "Google: Gmail Users Have No Reason to Expect Privacy" appear to have taken the passage out of context.

See also: How to Lock Down Facebook Privacy

The flurry of panic-inducing stories was started by Consumer Watchdog, with a piece that quoted a passage from page 19 of Google's motion to dismiss a class-action suit brought on by some Gmail and non-Gmail users that argue that the company illegally mines the content of Gmail accounts, violating several federal and state anti-wiretapping laws.

The passage read:

Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery. Indeed, "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties."

Consumer Watch's Privacy Project director was also quoted as saying: "Google has finally admitted they don’t respect privacy. People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents’ privacy don’t use Gmail."

What the stories neglected to do, however, was to put the passage in context, and to note that the last words, the ones in quotes, weren't Google's.

The passage is contained in a section that referred to plaintiffs who are non-Gmail users. What Google was arguing, as a person with knowledge of the proceedings confirmed to Mashable, was that it treats the emails non-Gmail users send to Gmail users the same as every other email that passes through Google's servers.

In short, if you don't have Gmail, but you send an email to your friend who does, the email he receives is subject to the same privacy policy as any other email. And Google's terms of agreement allow the company to scan emails to filter spam and serve ads.

Google wasn't trying to say that Gmail users have no expectation of privacy whatsoever, as the person we contacted confirmed.

Additionally, the part of the passage in quotes ( "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties") is taken from a Supreme Court case (Smith v. Maryland) which ruled that installing a "pen register" is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. (A "pen register" is an electronic device that records all numbers called from a particular phone, but not the content of the calls.)

The case was one of the two Supreme Court cases that established the so-called "third party doctrine," a legal theory according to which a user who turns over information to a company — the third party — doesn't have an expectation of privacy over that data.

As The Next Web noted: on its own, the passage might have been "a damning statement that exposes an apparent disdain on Google’s part for consumer privacy." But initial reports failed to put the company's words in context, or include the passage's next sentence, which clarifies Googles position further (and, again, is only referring to non-Gmail plaintiffs):

In particular, the Court noted that persons communicating through a service provided by an intermediary (in the Smith case, a telephone call routed through a telephone company) must necessarily expect that the communication will be subject to the intermediary’s systems.

Google released the following statement to Mashable: "We take our users’ privacy and security very seriously; recent reports claiming otherwise are simply untrue. We have built industry-leading security and privacy features into Gmail — and no matter who sends an email to a Gmail user, those protections apply."

Google's Motion in Gmail Class Action Suit

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