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Edison posted a response[0] with this amazing sentence: > to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, our company Edison Software

by css 7y ago

Edison posted a response[0] with this amazing sentence: > to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, our company Edison Software, measures e-commerce through a technology that automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts anonymous purchase information from them [0]: https://medium.com/changing-communications/a-reminder-of-how-we-use-data-and-protect-privacy-8b0cb2c5af71 https://medium.com/changing-communications/a-reminder-of-how... (non-Medium: https://outline.com/7K3TAL https://outline.com/7K3TAL)

itronitron 7y ago
I am having trouble parsing that out, why would they be extracting 'anonymous' purchase information from 'automatically recognize[d] commercial emails' if they care about protecting privacy... ?
gumby 7y ago
"we had to destroy the village in order to save it" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/destroying-a-quote-s-history-in-order-to-save-it https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/destro...
JohnFen 7y ago
That's an amazing level of marketing doublespeak right there. Protecting my privacy by reading my emails? Right, pull the other one.
Hoasi 7y ago
That's a painfully shameful attempt to conceal malicious practice.
gnicholas 7y ago
Sounds pretty silly to extract your data instead of showing you ads — all in the name of protecting your privacy. But to play devil's advocate, some ads do actually invade your privacy because they come from malicious malvertisers. If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this. Or they could just run an ad platform that blocks malvertisements...
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this. There is no privacy benefit here because you'd have even better privacy protections if they didn't trawl through your emails and extract data from them in the first place.

by css 7y ago

itronitron 7y ago

I am having trouble parsing that out, why would they be extracting 'anonymous' purchase information from 'automatically recognize[d] commercial emails' if they care about protecting privacy... ?

gumby 7y ago

"we had to destroy the village in order to save it" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/destroying-a-quote-s-history-in-order-to-save-it https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/destro...

JohnFen 7y ago

That's an amazing level of marketing doublespeak right there. Protecting my privacy by reading my emails? Right, pull the other one.

Hoasi 7y ago

That's a painfully shameful attempt to conceal malicious practice.

gnicholas 7y ago

Sounds pretty silly to extract your data instead of showing you ads — all in the name of protecting your privacy. But to play devil's advocate, some ads do actually invade your privacy because they come from malicious malvertisers. If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this. Or they could just run an ad platform that blocks malvertisements...

JohnFen 7y ago
> If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this. There is no privacy benefit here because you'd have even better privacy protections if they didn't trawl through your emails and extract data from them in the first place.