>"So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service."
This reminds me of the United CEO "apology" that wasn't. Really, your gentle little heart was just shattered to learn people were upset that you send their bloody Lyft receipts from their email inbox to Uber!! You pour soul!
You know, America, you could do with less bullshit. I would respect this guy more if he said simply, "We offer a service at no charge, and in order to make money, which is what we need to live and so do our employees, we mine data from inboxes and sell it. This is all in our privacy policy which I advise everyone read before they hand anyone access to their email."
>"We offer a service at no charge, and in order to make money, which is what we need to live and so do our employees, we mine data from inboxes and sell it. This is all in our privacy policy which I advise everyone read before they hand anyone access to their email."
You can deal with that. I can deal with that. Most people here can deal with that. A lot of people can deal with that. The news can put some spin on that, use it to enrage a bunch people who don't know any better causing a problem that makes shareholders unwilling to deal with that.
Welcome to the modern world. Being frank about things isn't a risk worth taking.
I think they might just be saying that we tend to reward lying and punish honesty, so we shouldn't be too surprised when this sort of thing happens.
It frustrates the shit out of me, but I think it's true in many cases. This company would have died instantly if they had been up-front about what they were doing. By lying, they've managed to have some success. I don't condone lying and I wish they wouldn't do it, but given the incentives, I'm not surprised that they did.
I take your point, but we didn't reward lying here--they profited as long as we were unaware they lied. Once revealed, the ship is going down fast. This is just to say that crime pays... until it doesn't.
What would be scandalous (and still might be) would be for this to be revealed, and no one to care about it. I'm cautiously optimistic this might be the case--even Uber's bad behaviour is catching up to it.
I think we did reward lying. We didn't intentionally reward lying, but that's not what I meant. We don't intend for this to happen, but that's how it works out the way things are set up.
The ship is going down fast, but how much money did they make in the meantime? Will the CEO's salary and bonuses be clawed back? I doubt it.
Not moral, profitable. Companies are evaluated on their profit, not on their moral decisions (unless those decisions are illegal, but there's no law against saying "By signing up, you consent to us data-mining your inbox and selling the data").
And, of course, nobody is saying that it's a good thing that companies are evaluated on profit and not morality, just that it's true.
This is truly despicable. Honestly, they signed up users for a _completely_ different service and monetize by mining gmail data. TBH, I feel the same rage against all Google services which are about taking notes, mail, contacts, location and what not whereas in reality they are just mining away. For the startups out there - the Big G is an exception because their service is so wide spread and hard to ignore that people accept their mining as a necessary evil but for others this is totally not a good business model.
You are selling google short. Google doesn't sell their consumer data to anyone directly. They use it to help inform advertisers how to sell stuff to you. Uproll is directly selling data about their customers to third parties for whoever will pay.
This is not true of unroll. From the blog, "I can't stress enough the importance of your privacy. We never, ever release personal data about you. All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only. To get a sense of what this data looks like and how it is used, check out the Slice Intelligence blog.". So they are the same as Google.
At the end of the day, nobody outside the company truly knows if either of them sell identifiable information.
YMMV on how anonymous anonymized data actually is considering that most people are uniquely identified by the combination of date of birth, zip code and gender[1].
If you're jumping off Unroll.me, first log into unroll.me via your Google Login. Go to settings, turn off everything (like the ad tracking) and then delete your account. It's at the bottom of the page in light grey. They'll ask why you're deleting. I'd suggest choosing "privacy".
After, that head into Google > Account > "Connected Apps & Sites" > Manage Apps -- and then explicitly remove Unroll.me there too.
Don't do the reverse as the Google Access is needed to log in and delete the Unroll-side data*
* Assuming they delete anything, but still worth doing.
Actually what is needed is MORE lobbying ... just for the right things by the right people. We'll never stop lobbying by those who are already powerful. But those who are not can empower themselves.
PS: Event doing what you propose "less lobbying, less money in politics" would require lots and lots of lobbying (as this is the current system).
How does that work? If I have a server in my US living room, and someone from an overprotective country visits my server, and my pokemon trading site sets an is_deleted flag to keep foreign keys valid, can you really say I'm breaking the law?
It doesn't seem like laws specific to some European country should apply anywhere outside of that country. I can maybe see the EU(since they like to apply laws everywhere).
You did call them 'customers', which means there's an exchange of money. Is there a restriction on European banks to prohibit them from dealing with sites that don't comply with the country's law?
Don't do business in the EU if you don't intend to respect the laws. I find the word 'overprotective' out of place in your comment, it says that you feel that once someone gives you their data it is yours to do with as you please.
As for laws specific to a country applying outside it: you can do whatever you want but the moment you hold assets abroad or intend to travel you are exposing yourself to potential legal action, something always good to keep in mind. The United States has a long history of enforcing its laws outside its borders.
Also, you are wrong about how you'd go about implementing such deletion. You don't need an 'is_deleted' flag at all to keep your foreign keys valid, all you would have to do is to overwrite the record with random data or blank the personally identifiable fields and delete anything that that user has given you. That's not that hard and purposefully mis-implementing that would not look very good if it ever came to a lawsuit. Pro-tip: consult with a lawyer versed in the matter if you want to do this stuff at all it is better to do it by the book.
"Keeping foreign keys valid" is not an excuse to break the law.
> Don't do business in the EU if you don't intend to respect the laws.
A lot of Japanese sites IP-ban foreigners so they don't have to deal with them. I always figured, why not leave the site open for everyone but not officially support them? I guess putting technical measures in place prevents having your assets seized, or being sued or arrested when you step foot there.
If an EU customer with data retention laws uses a VPN to bypass an IP-block(and pays with bitcoin or something), would you still be subject to their laws? Or would the attempt to block them be sufficient legally?
It's not about you blocking them or not blocking them. It's simply about respecting the rights of your users. If you feel that taking users data without giving them the option to ask for you to delete it needs laws that can and will be enforced then you can see why our industry has a bad reputation when it comes to managing end user data.
This sort of behavior is exactly why the industry is no longer self-regulating but is now forcibly regulated in the EU. And soon to be much more forcibly regulated, come 2018 the new version of the DPD will come into effect which has much more teeth because there are still plenty of companies that are trying to evade their responsibilities. For instance, from then on, if you have been breached you will be required by law to report the breach.
So, be nice to your users, respect their data and try to be better than your competitors rather than to find ways in which you can creatively evade legislation that is especially meant to apply to you and your customers.
Prefacing that I think we all have a right to privacy/right to be forgotten, or whatever phrasing is used for this in the EU, as a thought exercise, I'm wondering if you didn't want to abide by this, could you effectively do it? If I run an app and didn't want to handle the whole process of deleting user data or wanted to keep it for later, for whatever reason, would it be possible to forbid/block EU users/customers from using the website?
Delete their email address, name, or any other identifying information. That's it.
To me, the troubling factor is that the EU hasn't clarified the law so seeks to apply it to individuals who are not in the EU and never intended to do business with EU residents.
Honestly though, if you tell users you can delete their data on request, you should just do that - delete all of their data, full stop. If you can't or choose not to, you should just be up front about that, also - that means in plain language they will see, not buried in a TOS or whatever. It's the only ethical way to handle this. National boundaries and jurisdiction are side issues, really.
It would also be really nice if Google told you the last time an app accessed your account (or at least within a certain time frame, like "last 30 days", "last 90 days", etc). Facebook shows this information, and I just went and checked my app authorizations on my Google account to make sure that Unroll.me wasn't there, since I stopped using it a while ago and deleted my account, and saw that it was still there, but with no last accessed time, only the initial authorization time. It's frustrating that Google can't add a simple piece of very useful information onto their dashboard.
Yeah, it cuts off new email, but my Gmail account has over 13 years of data -- I'm sure a lot of other people have had Gmail for as long. It's the initial load of data to Unroll.me that hits hardest.
They can do better.. yet they still haven't updated their FAQ. You'd think that at the very least, before trying publicly trying to cover their asses, they'd at least do the bare minimum and write SOMETHING about it on the FAQ. Why even link to the FAQ from the blog post if you haven't touched it yet?
Don't say you're going to do something going forward, DO IT.
Let's be honest, pretty clear that Google is already selling your anonymized data (actually, I think it's their data according to the TOS you agreed to). And giving your un-anonymized data to the government. Eww.
There's no reason to get up in arms here... there's no such thing as privacy -- whenever you use a free service, you are the product being sold.
Wouldn't it just be better for them to come out and say:
"We were mining your emails for profit and tried to hide that in our marketing and brand. We will continue to mine your emails if you want to use our free service, but we'll be more upfront about it in the future."
Why bother trying to act sincerely apologetic? I'd be more sympathetic to them if they would just bluntly state what they want to do.
I don't think their chosen approach has resonated well with their users at all (emotionally or intellectually). People find it hilariously insincere and insulting.
It seems it would be better received if they were up-front in this instance.
They might as well tell their users, "This is how it is. Take it or leave it." Instead of trying to wrap that same message in a layer of false sincerity and lies.
Part of what we can't see is what percentage of their user base is even going to hear of this. HN may be up in arms, but if that's all that happens it may not amount to much. Then again, huge swathes of their user base may in fact be HN or people influenced enough by people reading this article to delete it. It's hard for us to know from here.
Speaking for myself, I'd never even heard of this company, so I doubt it's an HN darling particularly.
I assure you, millions of people pay good money for the privilege of having their eyeballs and viewing preferences sold to advertisers. As said above - we call it cable television.
Just because you are a customer does not mean you won't be monetized.
His comment wasn't denying that - it's wasn't saying that you're the product <=> you're not paying for a service. It was a single way implication: you're not paying for the service => you're the product. There can be other cases that lead to you being the product - that is, being monetized.
While it's true you can be paying someone to sell you to some third-party, it's virtually never the case where a private firm offers you a service completely gratis without sell you to some third-party. Furthermore, without the exchange of funds, you lose a lot of legal protections and the ability to hold the company accountable for a lot of their actions.
I know it might be annoying to hear it over and over, but I think it bares repeating because I can guarantee you that only some people have heard that phrase, and far fewer have truly understood it's impact.
It is. There is nobody here who hasn't heard it a dozen times, and the general public audience it should be aimed at doesn't understand it.
Further, it is cited as a rule but it is far from one. Paying for a product doesn't guarantee your privacy and using a free product doesn't mean your privacy is being violated.
For ex. you can pay for Google Apps over Gmail but the privacy policy and terms of use is still the same (I actually can't think of a single service with a pro paid level where you gain privacy - Flickr, Dropbox, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Office online - you name it). Likewise there are countless examples of free and open source software that do respect your privacy.
I don't think there is a shortcut to teaching the general public about privacy - especially not one that can be wrapped in a one line cliche.
> Paying for a product doesn't guarantee your privacy and using a free product doesn't mean your privacy is being violated.
While what you say is logical, it gets scary pretty quickly. What about uber? What about airbnb? Or worse, what about paypal, intuit, wells fargo?
I propose a simple thought experiment as a band-aid. If we can't beat them, we must join them. Every company that collects information about me, must disclose the said information to me. Failure to disclose in a reasonable time frame should result in an automatic fine worth 100x minimum wage per hour every hour after the end of the reasonable time frame. Of course, we'd need very strong whistle blower protection. This would be a terrible idea because if it works (and I doubt it), it will have a huge chilling effect on small businesses. Responding to all the requests would put them out of business.
I don't know what the solution could be... but I know educating people is difficult especially when the people don't want to be educated.
It's getting a bit repetitive in this thread, but I can't help but to mention that what you're proposing is the legal status quo in the EU.
At some point so many people started annoying Facebook with these requests that they added a self-service option to download all the data they have on you somewhere in setting. (Google has something similar, "Google takeout")
They shouldn't but Google does not have much in terms of Chinese Walls internally. The contents of your gmail account or youtube history could easily affect your search results.
I am pretty sure Google's allowed to use any of your data for two purposes: Improving their services (which arguably, your example would fall under) or for promotional purposes.
One of the big changes a couple years ago was when they unified all their terms and privacy policies under one that applied to your entire account. So I don't think there'd any longer be any distinction between where the data came from and which Google product they were using it for.
> At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets.
However, their Privacy Notice claims to not store emails that are not personal emails but certain types of "commercial" emails as defined by the CAN-SPAM act.
> We also collect non-personal information − data in a form that does not permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. For example, when you use our services, we may collect data from and about the “commercial electronic mail messages” and “transactional or relationship messages” (as such terms are defined in the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7702 et. seq.) that are sent to your email accounts. We collect such commercial transactional messages so that we can better understand the behavior of the senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may disclose, distribute, transfer, and sell such messages and the data that we collect from or in connection with such messages; provided, however, if we do disclose such messages or data, all personal information contained in such messages will be removed prior to any such disclosure.
We may collect and use your commercial transactional messages and associated data to build anonymous market research products and services with trusted business partners. If we combine non-personal information with personal information, the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.
Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Notice.
> However, their Privacy Notice claims to not store emails that are not personal emails but certain types of "commercial" emails as defined by the CAN-SPAM act.
> Are they really hoovering up everything?
I worked on a competing product a long long time ago. (Well, a competitor in the "all your emails are belong to us" space.)
The way ours worked was that we hovered everything, but before we provided any analytics staff access to it, we grabbed only emails of interest, tokenized the data in them, and then copied them to the analytics data store.
But we were constantly refining what "of interest" meant, which means that we had to go back and re scan the archives periodically, which would always turn up new stuff for the analytics team. The need to re scan historical data as the models improved meant that we had to keep all of the source material, even if it wasn't accessible to the people who were most interested in looking at it.
As someone with a startup that heavily leverages Gmail OAuth, this kind of thing is upsetting because it causes folks to lose trust in the technology. Google is partly at fault here though. There should be an audit trail visible to users so that they can see every time a third-party service downloads a message or an attachment. There should also be more granular scopes so that folks can, for example, authorize access to only email threads with certain labels, including the built-in labels. (E.g. only personal email or only commercial email.)
It would also be nice if there were a way for folks with the gmail ID of a thread to download the parsed thread/attachments from Google, with a special scope designed for this. (So that services can get the entire DKIM-validated thread by just letting users copy an address, forward the last message, or via a plugin.)
I spent over a week writing our TOS, privacy policy, and security page, but privacy laws and the underlying technology should be sane enough by default that people shouldn't need to feel like they need to closely parse every word before signing up.
Totally agree with the audit trail. From time to time I look at which accounts are connected and nuke most, but making this a better informed decision through access history would be great.
The ability to restrict access to specific domains would be really helpful for a lot of use cases.
For example, there are several travel apps that watch for flight and hotel emails, and then track them / notify you about them. If I could give the app permission to access emails from delta.com, united.com, southwest.com, and aa.com, I would be a lot more comfortable granting access. As it is now, I have to give the app read AND write access to ALL email.
That only works for individual email messages though, not for threads. So in this case it would work, but it's not a great generalized solution, even by hacky workaround standards.
Add the specific names involved (e.g. Jojo Hedaya) to a list in your head, they'll inevitably be involved in more shadiness throughout the years and it's fun to reminisce.
I agree that this is completely appalling and their apology is basically "Sorry you didn't know." But let's not characterize Jojo Hedaya as a bad guy just yet, I did a basic searched and didn't find anything else shady from him. I guess what I'm saying is let's give him a chance and hope for the best, one big thing like this shouldn't mean he is beyond redemption. At least that is what I hope and believe about humanity.
What I always wonder about when I see business like these: What comes first? Do they first think about what they could sell and then go about setting up a service that gets users to provide them with that data or do they first create a nice service and then realize they have to keep the lights on somehow?
> Shoparoo is trying to take grocery product collection programs, like General Mills Box Tops for Education, into the smartphone age. Our primary business is market research, specifically collecting item-level purchase data from households, said CEO Jared Schrieber in an interview. We developed an amazing technology that allows this data to be captured in just seconds via people simply snapping pictures of their receipts with their smartphones. However, this begged the question, how could we encourage a large number of people to spend a few seconds after each shopping trip taking pictures of their receipts? Our answer, Shoparoo, was inspired by the Box Tops for Education school fundraising program where parents spend a few moments of their time cutting out product labels from grocery products.
I feel so frustrated. This Jojo CEO is just gonna get away with it, and in a few days people will forget. He will continue his status as a "successful entrepreneur", getting investments and still selling customer private information to whomever or whatever.
And nothing's gonna happen to protect user's privacy. All I (or any one) can do is to use fake accounts to sign-up for free services.
I had deleted my unroll.me account several months back - yet I still receive emails from time to time about the new subscriptions I have. They've not had permissions in my Google account since I deleted my account, so it's odd that I keep getting emails from them.
> from this point forward, with clearer messaging on our website, in our app, and in our FAQs.
Yet when you try to subscribe, are freaked out by the permissions required and don't give access to your entire email you're greeted with the following message: "Unroll.Me takes your privacy & security seriously"
I remember hearing about unroll.me, last year or so. It made no sense to me, at first. But then I got that they needed full access to my email accounts. I was gobsmacked.
I really don't get why people would be OK with that. Somehow the possibility of a cleaner inbox doesn't seem worth the risk of identity theft.
143 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". The free services should worry you
>"So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service."
This reminds me of the United CEO "apology" that wasn't. Really, your gentle little heart was just shattered to learn people were upset that you send their bloody Lyft receipts from their email inbox to Uber!! You pour soul!
You know, America, you could do with less bullshit. I would respect this guy more if he said simply, "We offer a service at no charge, and in order to make money, which is what we need to live and so do our employees, we mine data from inboxes and sell it. This is all in our privacy policy which I advise everyone read before they hand anyone access to their email."
You can deal with that. I can deal with that. Most people here can deal with that. A lot of people can deal with that. The news can put some spin on that, use it to enrage a bunch people who don't know any better causing a problem that makes shareholders unwilling to deal with that.
Welcome to the modern world. Being frank about things isn't a risk worth taking.
It frustrates the shit out of me, but I think it's true in many cases. This company would have died instantly if they had been up-front about what they were doing. By lying, they've managed to have some success. I don't condone lying and I wish they wouldn't do it, but given the incentives, I'm not surprised that they did.
What would be scandalous (and still might be) would be for this to be revealed, and no one to care about it. I'm cautiously optimistic this might be the case--even Uber's bad behaviour is catching up to it.
The ship is going down fast, but how much money did they make in the meantime? Will the CEO's salary and bonuses be clawed back? I doubt it.
And, of course, nobody is saying that it's a good thing that companies are evaluated on profit and not morality, just that it's true.
At the end of the day, nobody outside the company truly knows if either of them sell identifiable information.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967
That is also in contravention of the EU DPD:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive
Specifically, point 2: Purpose.
After, that head into Google > Account > "Connected Apps & Sites" > Manage Apps -- and then explicitly remove Unroll.me there too.
Don't do the reverse as the Google Access is needed to log in and delete the Unroll-side data*
* Assuming they delete anything, but still worth doing.
PS: Event doing what you propose "less lobbying, less money in politics" would require lots and lots of lobbying (as this is the current system).
It doesn't seem like laws specific to some European country should apply anywhere outside of that country. I can maybe see the EU(since they like to apply laws everywhere).
You did call them 'customers', which means there's an exchange of money. Is there a restriction on European banks to prohibit them from dealing with sites that don't comply with the country's law?
As for laws specific to a country applying outside it: you can do whatever you want but the moment you hold assets abroad or intend to travel you are exposing yourself to potential legal action, something always good to keep in mind. The United States has a long history of enforcing its laws outside its borders.
Also, you are wrong about how you'd go about implementing such deletion. You don't need an 'is_deleted' flag at all to keep your foreign keys valid, all you would have to do is to overwrite the record with random data or blank the personally identifiable fields and delete anything that that user has given you. That's not that hard and purposefully mis-implementing that would not look very good if it ever came to a lawsuit. Pro-tip: consult with a lawyer versed in the matter if you want to do this stuff at all it is better to do it by the book.
"Keeping foreign keys valid" is not an excuse to break the law.
A lot of Japanese sites IP-ban foreigners so they don't have to deal with them. I always figured, why not leave the site open for everyone but not officially support them? I guess putting technical measures in place prevents having your assets seized, or being sued or arrested when you step foot there.
If an EU customer with data retention laws uses a VPN to bypass an IP-block(and pays with bitcoin or something), would you still be subject to their laws? Or would the attempt to block them be sufficient legally?
This sort of behavior is exactly why the industry is no longer self-regulating but is now forcibly regulated in the EU. And soon to be much more forcibly regulated, come 2018 the new version of the DPD will come into effect which has much more teeth because there are still plenty of companies that are trying to evade their responsibilities. For instance, from then on, if you have been breached you will be required by law to report the breach.
So, be nice to your users, respect their data and try to be better than your competitors rather than to find ways in which you can creatively evade legislation that is especially meant to apply to you and your customers.
If they use it, they're the ones breaking the agreement.
Not sure what would happen though. If they sue you, you can probably sue them back. But not sure what you would end up needing to do.
To me, the troubling factor is that the EU hasn't clarified the law so seeks to apply it to individuals who are not in the EU and never intended to do business with EU residents.
Honestly though, if you tell users you can delete their data on request, you should just do that - delete all of their data, full stop. If you can't or choose not to, you should just be up front about that, also - that means in plain language they will see, not buried in a TOS or whatever. It's the only ethical way to handle this. National boundaries and jurisdiction are side issues, really.
Not really, at least I've found keeping data much harder than deleting it. The only hard part is backups.
Deleting all data is as you note, easy, with the exception of backups.
Don't say you're going to do something going forward, DO IT.
There's no reason to get up in arms here... there's no such thing as privacy -- whenever you use a free service, you are the product being sold.
"We were mining your emails for profit and tried to hide that in our marketing and brand. We will continue to mine your emails if you want to use our free service, but we'll be more upfront about it in the future."
Why bother trying to act sincerely apologetic? I'd be more sympathetic to them if they would just bluntly state what they want to do.
It seems it would be better received if they were up-front in this instance.
They might as well tell their users, "This is how it is. Take it or leave it." Instead of trying to wrap that same message in a layer of false sincerity and lies.
Speaking for myself, I'd never even heard of this company, so I doubt it's an HN darling particularly.
Much of the time, you are both the client and the product. See, for example: Cable television.
Saying that a true statement is "trite" and "meaningless" doesn't make it untrue.
Just because you are a customer does not mean you won't be monetized.
While it's true you can be paying someone to sell you to some third-party, it's virtually never the case where a private firm offers you a service completely gratis without sell you to some third-party. Furthermore, without the exchange of funds, you lose a lot of legal protections and the ability to hold the company accountable for a lot of their actions.
I know it might be annoying to hear it over and over, but I think it bares repeating because I can guarantee you that only some people have heard that phrase, and far fewer have truly understood it's impact.
Further, it is cited as a rule but it is far from one. Paying for a product doesn't guarantee your privacy and using a free product doesn't mean your privacy is being violated.
For ex. you can pay for Google Apps over Gmail but the privacy policy and terms of use is still the same (I actually can't think of a single service with a pro paid level where you gain privacy - Flickr, Dropbox, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Office online - you name it). Likewise there are countless examples of free and open source software that do respect your privacy.
I don't think there is a shortcut to teaching the general public about privacy - especially not one that can be wrapped in a one line cliche.
While what you say is logical, it gets scary pretty quickly. What about uber? What about airbnb? Or worse, what about paypal, intuit, wells fargo?
I propose a simple thought experiment as a band-aid. If we can't beat them, we must join them. Every company that collects information about me, must disclose the said information to me. Failure to disclose in a reasonable time frame should result in an automatic fine worth 100x minimum wage per hour every hour after the end of the reasonable time frame. Of course, we'd need very strong whistle blower protection. This would be a terrible idea because if it works (and I doubt it), it will have a huge chilling effect on small businesses. Responding to all the requests would put them out of business.
I don't know what the solution could be... but I know educating people is difficult especially when the people don't want to be educated.
At some point so many people started annoying Facebook with these requests that they added a self-service option to download all the data they have on you somewhere in setting. (Google has something similar, "Google takeout")
One of the big changes a couple years ago was when they unified all their terms and privacy policies under one that applied to your entire account. So I don't think there'd any longer be any distinction between where the data came from and which Google product they were using it for.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180463
However, their Privacy Notice claims to not store emails that are not personal emails but certain types of "commercial" emails as defined by the CAN-SPAM act.
Are they really hoovering up everything?
From https://unroll.me/legal/privacy/
> We also collect non-personal information − data in a form that does not permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. For example, when you use our services, we may collect data from and about the “commercial electronic mail messages” and “transactional or relationship messages” (as such terms are defined in the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7702 et. seq.) that are sent to your email accounts. We collect such commercial transactional messages so that we can better understand the behavior of the senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may disclose, distribute, transfer, and sell such messages and the data that we collect from or in connection with such messages; provided, however, if we do disclose such messages or data, all personal information contained in such messages will be removed prior to any such disclosure.
We may collect and use your commercial transactional messages and associated data to build anonymous market research products and services with trusted business partners. If we combine non-personal information with personal information, the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.
Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Notice.
> Are they really hoovering up everything?
I worked on a competing product a long long time ago. (Well, a competitor in the "all your emails are belong to us" space.)
The way ours worked was that we hovered everything, but before we provided any analytics staff access to it, we grabbed only emails of interest, tokenized the data in them, and then copied them to the analytics data store.
But we were constantly refining what "of interest" meant, which means that we had to go back and re scan the archives periodically, which would always turn up new stuff for the analytics team. The need to re scan historical data as the models improved meant that we had to keep all of the source material, even if it wasn't accessible to the people who were most interested in looking at it.
It would also be nice if there were a way for folks with the gmail ID of a thread to download the parsed thread/attachments from Google, with a special scope designed for this. (So that services can get the entire DKIM-validated thread by just letting users copy an address, forward the last message, or via a plugin.)
I spent over a week writing our TOS, privacy policy, and security page, but privacy laws and the underlying technology should be sane enough by default that people shouldn't need to feel like they need to closely parse every word before signing up.
For example, there are several travel apps that watch for flight and hotel emails, and then track them / notify you about them. If I could give the app permission to access emails from delta.com, united.com, southwest.com, and aa.com, I would be a lot more comfortable granting access. As it is now, I have to give the app read AND write access to ALL email.
Add the specific names involved (e.g. Jojo Hedaya) to a list in your head, they'll inevitably be involved in more shadiness throughout the years and it's fun to reminisce.
http://shoparoo.com
http://betakit.com/shoparoo-partners-with-unilever-to-turn-r...
And nothing's gonna happen to protect user's privacy. All I (or any one) can do is to use fake accounts to sign-up for free services.
https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
Even after deleting your unroll account, they'll have access until you revoke it.
Yet when you try to subscribe, are freaked out by the permissions required and don't give access to your entire email you're greeted with the following message: "Unroll.Me takes your privacy & security seriously"
I really don't get why people would be OK with that. Somehow the possibility of a cleaner inbox doesn't seem worth the risk of identity theft.