Many privacy advocates have been outraged by the free service, which has not yet gone to general availability, mainly because it will be funded by advertising messages keyed to the content of users’ emails.
Senator Liz Figueroa submitted SB 1822 to the state senate yesterday. The law, if passed, would allow email providers to scan the content of outgoing email or instant messages only with the express consent of the user.
The provider would only be able to scan the text of incoming messages if the sender was on the same service and had also provided consent. The bill has a specific carve-out for scanning for spam, viruses or malicious programs.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
