Search engine rivals Yahoo! and Google are each the subject of new legal claims alleging violation of California's Invasion of Privacy Act, for their practice of scanning emails for ad targeting purposes.

Alabama resident Carson Penkava, in a suit filed with the federal court in San Jose, CA, claims Yahoo! intercepts messages sent from non-Yahoo! email accounts - thus people who have not given the company any kind of permission to monitor their activity - to its own customers, reviewing the keywords and sentiment in them for targeting purposes. The company’s privacy policy does allow it to scan the messages of its customers, according to www.mediapost.com .

In addition, according to a report on ABC News, three California residents are suing both Yahoo! and Google in Marin County state court. Stuart Diamond, David Sutton and Roland Williams say the Web giants are violating a state wiretap law prohibiting companies from intercepting communications without the consent of all parties.

Other lawsuits against Google’s long-established scanning of the communications of gmail customers, including one potential class action, are ongoing. Google says the system is based on ‘fully automated systems’ whose functions also include the filtering of spam and the detection of viruses and malware.

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