Combined with Riya, where users have upoaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya’s servers and tagged and labeled the subject’s faces to be searchable via Riya’s facial recognition technology, we are creeping closer and closer to a user-created, user-supported, and user-identified database of images of the population. The increased aggregation and tagging of my image has value externalities that have yet to be fully theorized. As I’ve warned before:

Sure, it would be great if I could easily search for pictures of me on the web, but do I want others to be able to do that as well? Could this provide a useful tool for stalkers looking for a particular person? Abusive partners trying to track down their victim? (Note that Riya also uploads and indexes all the metadata related to your photos, including the date and time is was taken, when it was uploaded, etc. Users can also tag and search photos based on location). …there are externalities once all of the images of our daily lives (and their related metadata) are uploaded to the Internet, indexed, searchable, and accessible to all.

The subpoena asks for not only current e-mail but also deleted e-mail: “All documents concerning all Gmail accounts of Baker…for the period from Jan. 1, 2003, to present, including but not limited to all e-mails and messages stored in all mailboxes, folders, in-boxes, sent items and deleted items, and all links to related Web pages contained in such e-mail messages.”

Google’s privacy policy says deleted e-mail messages “may remain in our offline backup systems” in perpetuity. It does not guarantee that backups are ever deleted. Baker estimated he may have tens of thousands of e-mail messages in his Gmail account.

Commentors at Discourse.net have noted that it isn’t entirely unreasonable for one’s deleted e-mail messages to be subject to searches or subpoenas. One states:

I’m not really disturbed by the deleted e-mail portion of this story. To me saying that they shouldn’t be subject to search is like saying that documents which have been shredded but can be reassembled should be immune from any search warrant or that, so long as you’ve thrown your drugs into the trash, the police shouldn’t be able to use them as evidence.

The lesson, then, is that deleting e-mails (especially those housed on third-party servers) is no guarantee that they are beyond the gaze of those who might benefit from seeing them.