Google is letting app makers read ALL your emails in global privacy fail
Gmail developers scan through hundreds of millions of inbox messages per day – and it's humans along with bots that are doing the spying
GOOGLE is giving app makers a free pass to spy on all your personal Gmail emails.
All it takes is a simple sign-up to an app using your Gmail login for its developer and other affiliated companies to gain access to your private messages, according to .
These email-based services typically include shopping price comparisons, automated travel-itinerary planners, and other tools.
One such firm, ReturnPath Inc., reportedly scanned the inboxes of a staggering 2million people to collect marketing data after they'd signed up for one of the free apps produced by its partners.
Its algorithms generally snoop on a whopping 100 million emails per day, none of which are censored to block out users' personal or sensitive info.
And at one point around two years ago, the company's employees also read around 8,000 uncensored emails to help train the firm's software.
These companies typically collect things like an email's recipient, sender, subject, time stamp, the text and receipt data for online purchases to glean clues about consumers that they can sell to marketers and other businesses.
This info allows companies to pinpoint, for example, the ideal time to send you emails and the type of language that will encourage you to open a message.
It can also help them figure out what products are trending and their average prices.
These kind of invasive tactics have become "common practice", a former exec at data collection firm eDataSource Inc. told WSJ.
Another firm called Edison Software – a Gmail developer that makes a mobile app for reading and organising emails – also reportedly had its workers review the Gmail messages of hundreds of users.
The expose comes a year after Google promised to stop scanning the inboxes of Gmail users to serve them targeted ads.
That practice had been in place for years, with Google justifying it as a necessary means to offset the cost that comes with providing a free email service.
And despite cries of foul play by privacy advocates, it didn't stop users signing up to Gmail in their droves.
The service now boasts 1.4billion global users – that's more users than the next 25 email providers combined.
Those rivals – like Yahoo and Microsoft Outlook – also give data miners access to your emails, providing you've given "express consent".
This fresh Gmail gaffe is the latest privacy fiasco to rock Silicon Valley, arriving on the heels of Facebook's historic Cambridge Analytica scandal. And it bears all the hallmarks of that breach of trust.
Like Facebook, Google allowed external developers to monitor your emails with little control over what they did with that data.
For its part, Google says that its rules bar app makers from providing data to anyone else “without explicit opt-in consent from that user” or from copying and storing that info – but developers told WSJ that the firm is doing little to enforce those policies.
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The only differences are that Facebook stopped its boundless data-sharing practice in 2015, while Google continues to do so – there's also no evidence that the third-party devs misused the Gmail data.
In Facebook's case, however, the profile info for roughly 87 million users made into the hands of political propaganda firm Cambridge Analytica.
We've reached out to Google for comment and will update this article with its response.
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