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There is a difference between "the app can read email", i.e. this piece of software that runs on my computer / my phone / in a Google datacenter can read emails
by pacala 8y ago
There is a difference between "the app can read email", i.e. this piece of software that runs on my computer / my phone / in a Google datacenter can read emails, and "the app can read email", i.e. the app siphons your email off into a third party server, with no privacy or data protection safeguards.
This user experience is well known and understood in the desktop world. Leave it to internet adtech companies to disrespect user's expecations for privacy and personal data protection.
Google could be more honest and label the permission "this app will make your email public for all intents and purposes".
- bdhess 8y ago> Google could be more honest and label the permission "this app will make your email public for all intents and purposes". How is offering the worst case hypothetical of what the 3rd party might do with your data _more honest_ than refraining from hypothesizing?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 8y agoBecause it turns out that the hypothetical case wasn’t so hypothetical after all.
- pacala 8y agoBecause that's what's happening. Having an app with both "read email" and "network access" is basically saying "this app will siphon your email to an unvetted and likely unsecure third party location". You wouldn't want your bank account info treated the same, would you. Would it be that hard to raise the user's awareness right then and there? Bonus points for offering a sandboxing mode, where the app can only access certain network locations, like Google IMAP servers, and only Google IMAP servers. Extra bonus points for auditing traffic from sandoxed apps to catch them if they try something fishy.
- simonh 8y agoThat’s not the same as making your emails public, ie posting them in a world readable archive.
- rayiner 8y agoRight. Outlook 2010 can read my email. Doesn’t mean I expect random engineers at Microsoft to be able to read my email.
- Alex3917 8y ago> Doesn’t mean I expect random engineers at Microsoft to be able to read my email. The basic problem is that unlike with SMS, where what gets displayed is what you sent, with email what gets displayed to the user is probably best described as being vaguely 'inspired' by what the sender wrote. Email clients need to make tons of decisions on things like typography, threading, displaying metadata, handling attachments, sanitizing user input, unicode and emojis, phishing, etc. Even within major email clients like Gmail, threads and messages regularly don't parse correctly. When a user reports that something is broken, or when an exception gets raised by the app because something doesn't parse properly, then it's not unreasonable for a developer to use that as fixture data to try to fix the issue, as long as this is explained in the privacy policy. In fact if you care about making / using good products, this is exactly what should happen. E.g. in our privacy policy it says, "If you let us know that an email thread isn't being parsed correctly, we may retrieve and store that specific thread for testing and debugging purposes."
- wpietri 8y agoA privacy policy that nobody ever reads is a poor place to put that. If you want informed consent, when they report an email thread parsing error specifically ask if including contents is ok.
- Alex3917 8y ago> A privacy policy that nobody ever reads is a poor place to put that. Leaving that out of the privacy policy would be legally and ethically problematic. You should also tell people at the point where data gets used (unless it’s obvious), but everything your site does needs to be in the privacy policy.
- 8y ago
- Animats 8y agoWhat if the program reading it is Insider Trading Tip Detector?