Is it illegal to access another person's Google account?

Definitely. One is not supposed to see the emails of another person without his permission. If you do that you are liable to be punished. If your friend complains to the cyber police they will book a case under cybercrime and investigation can be conducted. They will give punishment. The punishment may be imprisonment up to six months also and you may be asked to pay some penalty also. All depends on your friend.

You have to inform him directly. If some of your friends go and tell him, he will get annoyed and may immediately give a police complaint. So immediately you should go to your friend and say sorry to him. If he is a good friend of you and if he feels that the information you have seen is not that confidential he may not give a complaint and he will change his password so that you can't open again.

if he feels there is some important information which you are not supposed to see, he may be angry with you. All depends on how you convince him that what you have done is not intentional and it is a mistake.

As a human being, we should follow the ethics and display our good character in front of others. When we feel that letters addressed to others should not be opened and read, then how come we can open the Google account of others and read their contents. Moreover, when you open the account, Google sends alert to your friend and even one can know from where the account was opened. And if your friend comes to know that you are tracking the account even for a fun, that amounts to serious private security lapse of leaking personal details and that is not pardonable under court of law.

Whether you have done it intentionally or unintentionally, it is an illegal act and there are issues of privacy and security breaches. No one has authority to enter the forbidden path. Whether police catches you or not, it is our moral duty and moral obligation to apologise for such acts. As you have cheated the friend, it is natural that he will have ill feeling towards you. In such a case there is no harm in asking him to forgive you. A good friend will always be considerate and understands this pattern of other person's mindset. It is also said that curiosity kills the cat and and one can not be too proactive on this account. Google boasts about its security measures but anything can happen to it if people adhere to such novel methods and compromise on data.

The only remedy in such cases is to apologise and accept the fault.

To access the Gmail account or any other account of other person without his or her permission is ethically not good. If you do it with an intension of committing any crime, that it is surely illegal.
In your particular case, you logged into your friend's account without his knowledge but with no bad intension and you told him about it later. He might be your close friend and he took it lightly, but make it sure that you will not repeat the same in future.

Yes, it is definitely not a good act. May be you done it unintentionally or you didn't think to make harm to your friend by doing it. All piracy act got such a humble start. If you want to try and check another friend also in the same way, this will lead you to try more experiments. This is how an unintentional act convert to a seriel action. So better don't do such things.

Also the friend might thought about you in a negative way. May be he didn't told you openly. Nobody like to allow another person to intrude their privacy. Email and Google accounts are part of privacy of a person.

When I studied in the college, an incident happened which is similar to this case. One of my friend happened to open the mail id of another close friend. He was moved very badly on this act and started crying. It took more time to console him . We asked him to change the password immediately and he done that. So different person will behave different ways in such situations.

Yes, you have accessed your friend's Google account without his knowledge, it will be considered as illegal and comes under hacking activity. Hacking activity includes use of password cracking algorithm to gain access to a system. You have not used any algorithm but login his account without his knowledge.

Now already you have told your friend about this. I think it is totally up to him. How will he treat this matter? He can simply change his password or if he will feel that there is some data loss or if there was something personal that he does not want to share with you, in that case he may or may not take an action or legal activity against you. He can break his friendship with you also. If he will become much annoyed he can file a complaint /FIR against you. If he will report to police then you may get punished and may get imprisoned for six to five year based upon the seriousness of issue and fine may be imposed on you. But you can convince him and make an apology. May be he will forgive you.

I have some advice. Please inform your friend that he should put a difficult password. If you were able to access it so easily, it means that the password is not a secure one and thus anybody can access his account and get personal details from it. His account will be open to real hackers.

It is hoped that you will henceforth not do such a thing again with anyone, even it is just for fun. What was the need to do it? Do not get tempted to indulge in such activities. It creates mistrust and can break a relationship. Keep in mind, too, that small wrongdoings may lead to worse unethical and illegal activities in the long run. Do not start on the path of self-destructing your very character.

It is not a decent idea to acess the email of others since many informations are saved by the users which could of sensetive in nature and one may not like to share the same.
In the event of using his email , you may come across many vital informations which he might not have shared with anyone else. It would be even more worst if someone passes this information to your friend regarding the unfair usage of his email deliberately and this development would lead to termination of your relationship with your friend.
Here the case may not end and he may approach Police - station for registering a cyber crime against you.
In that event, it will be an ugly development and you may be liable to be proscuted any period between six months to five years apart from facing a humiliation from the different quarter.
Hence you should always be transparent in your relationship so that relationship is not strained by resorting to any unlawful step.

Hi Yogesh.

There's an Information Technology Act that deals with cybercrimes and electronic commerce. There are different sections under it for different types of cybercrimes done by hackers. The section that is applicable in your case is Section 66 (2) of the IT Act.

According to Section 66(2) of the Information Technology Act, 2002-

"Whoever commits hacking shall be punished with imprisonment of 3 years or with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees or with both."

So, yes it is illegal to interfere with the personal information of others without their knowledge. Even if you were only curious to see if the account of your friend is accessible with your knowledge of their id and a guessed password, once the account is accessed by you, without the knowledge of your friend, no matter how close the person is, you have done something that is illegal in the eyes of law.

If you have opened or read any of the personal or confidential information then you have breached your friend's privacy and it also results in cybercrime even if you didn't use the information anywhere for good or bad purposes.

Also, remember that there are enough ways to know who opened whose account so if anything wrong happens, the hacker can easily be identified and sent to jail. So, don't get curious about the personal information of others. Such curiosity often results in crimes.

Maybe your friend won't complain but remember to not repeat this incident ever again.

It is not understood what was the need of going into someones account as it is considered as the privacy violation. It has definitely some legal implications and under cyber laws it is a punishable act. Generally hackers and other such elements in the internet world do such acts of mischief. In internet, privacy and security of data of individuals or companies has become a big concern and as a good surfer we all must take care in abiding by the cyber ethics in the matter.