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I know of at least one startup who do this and use a "machine learning algorithm" to find details of particular things in your inbox. That "algorithm" is a guy

I know of at least one startup who do this and use a "machine learning algorithm" to find details of particular things in your inbox. That "algorithm" is a guy in their office. He reads your email. He searches it for common keywords, uses some regexes, but ultimately reads your email, then copies bits out into the system. I'm all for bootstrapping with things that don't scale, but this example was a bad-faith use of Gmail access. I'm glad I don't use Gmail so couldn't accidentally give a random guy access to my inbox.

enieslobby 8y ago
It's very hard to accidentally give a random guy access to your Gmail inbox. Doing so would require you to opt in to a dialog clearly and explicitly stating that you are giving said permission to a developer.
- rob_b 8y ago
  You’re dismissing the observation that users habitually click accept or continue when prompted with a dialog. Sure, you can blame this on the users being lazy but it becomes ingrained into users when everything they access has a dialog, especially when that contains terms of service that would be twenty pages long in paper form (slight exaggeration). I cannot even count the number of times I’ve had conversations with people when observing this behavior. So many users inherently trust that what they’re agreeing to is not only safe, but widely accepted. After all, why else would the service be so popular and have so many users—“Someone out there had to make sure this was legit before me.”
  - tedeh 8y ago
    Im suggesting a UI feature same as the one Github has when deleting repos: clearly input the full name of the repo, or in this case, maybe input ”I UNDERSTAND” in order to proceed. This could be a browser plugin maybe... Access to my personal email would be pretty much security game over for me as far as I can tell. Other people might feel otherwise.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  "Log in with your Gmail details to do X" This throws up all sorts of red flags with us, but not with most people. It's easy to not realise what's going to happen here.

enieslobby 8y ago

It's very hard to accidentally give a random guy access to your Gmail inbox. Doing so would require you to opt in to a dialog clearly and explicitly stating that you are giving said permission to a developer.

rob_b 8y ago
You’re dismissing the observation that users habitually click accept or continue when prompted with a dialog. Sure, you can blame this on the users being lazy but it becomes ingrained into users when everything they access has a dialog, especially when that contains terms of service that would be twenty pages long in paper form (slight exaggeration). I cannot even count the number of times I’ve had conversations with people when observing this behavior. So many users inherently trust that what they’re agreeing to is not only safe, but widely accepted. After all, why else would the service be so popular and have so many users—“Someone out there had to make sure this was legit before me.”
- tedeh 8y ago
  Im suggesting a UI feature same as the one Github has when deleting repos: clearly input the full name of the repo, or in this case, maybe input ”I UNDERSTAND” in order to proceed. This could be a browser plugin maybe... Access to my personal email would be pretty much security game over for me as far as I can tell. Other people might feel otherwise.
danpalmer 8y ago
"Log in with your Gmail details to do X" This throws up all sorts of red flags with us, but not with most people. It's easy to not realise what's going to happen here.