Its a line they crossed. You dont have the right to decide where that line is for other people. You can reason it into the benign all you like the fact is they were snooping in a targeted way.
If the NSA only checks the logs of people to see if they received an email is it ok because they were just looking for "terrorists"?
They have the right because it's their service. No one is forcing you or anyone else to use their email service. If you don't like it, you're free to move to another email service. Or better yet, do what I did and just have it go straight to your own domains email.
I'm sorry but I still have a right to privacy no matter whom the service belongs to. Companies cannot overturn my rights simply because they own the service. They are a carrier whether they like it or not and have to adhere to certain standards at the very least on social responsibility grounds.
I find the old companies can do what they want just use someone else fallacy very tired.
I can't simply change my email address that is something easier said than done. This isn't myspace were talking about or some dating service. This is my online identity and more and more my real life one at that.
Google already deliberately violates[0] the RFPs defining the expected behavior of their SMTP server by rewriting your headers when they want to. If they feel entitled to change your outgoing email messages, the other stuff shouldn't be too surprising.
Honestly I dont trust google in the slightest. They probably have more I formation on me and my peers than any other entity in the world. I'm not saying they are utterly untrustworthy or inherently evil, I simply dont just don't trust anyone that much.
Your statement is correct, but not relevant. Even if they had total market dominance, it would be a stretch to compare them to somebody using physical violence, and they certainly don't go out of their way to lock you into using gmail (compared to Yahoo, for instance, who didn't let me set up email forwarding without upgrading to a paid account).
Physical violence isn't the only form of might. "Might" is a synonym for power. And ownership, which is what squintychino claims justifies their actions, is certainly a form of power.
Checking if a message is marked spam or not isn't the best way to confirm a legal delivery. Say, I setup my Gmail to forward all mails to my thunderbird or outlook but when it gets there, the respective clients accidentally filter the specific message as spam, what then?
Monitoring for a "read bit" on the message is the only way to confirm proper delivery.
If Google checks its spam logs to ensure a mass mailing wasn't classified as spam, is that really equivalent to Microsoft's action?
Checking spam logs is a lot more benign than rummaging around through a specific user's email.