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Comment by sheepleherd | Hacker News Reader

Cui bono? who benefits?

There are general principles in the law that would say in this specific case, Google is making money off this arrangement, this arrangement is based on making money off of scanning emails, people wronged by this arrangement have a right to recompense, so follow the money, that's where the recompense should come from.

Companies cannot dodge liability for their actions by hiding behind third parties. Otherwise, the UPS or Fedex labelled truck that just ran over your kid would, every time, turn out to be a flat broke independent contractor Uber driver that all the other companies in the chain would point the finger at.

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I think this a flawed analysis of the economics of the situation. The entity benefiting here is the school, by avoiding having to pay for email hosting. That Google gets paid (in cash or otherwise) for providing that service is not surprising, and not at all analogous to hiring an independent contractor.

IANAL, but it seems to me the important consideration here is who has duty of care regarding the students, and it's seems clear that it's the school.

Now, if Google lied regarding the scanning, the complaint may be valid, but that's a different argument.

What I described is actually how it works as I was taught in a university law course. Your "economic analysis" sounds to me like logical speculation on your part, which while it may be a superficially valid way to parse the situation, and under historical common law could have been how courts determined the outcome, is from what I learned simply not how courts actually handle it. "Saved costs" is not a category from which a judgement could be obtained, while "profits" is, and "profits" is an actual motivation to set up an unclean liability shifting arrangement.

You will see this case continue to move forward through the courts which it would not--plaintiff's lawyers would not even pursue it--if you were correct.

and as a final point, I was not drawing an analogy to independent contract workers, I was using one as an example of an arrangement a court would see through; remove that term and my argument still applies.

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