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Unroll.me

daringfireball.net

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Unroll.me

#21
I find it fascinating that there are services which require access to your complete inbox, irrespective of how useful they might be or what they've written in their privacy policy. Every single email you ever sent/received, and every single email you will send/receive. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but sorry, that's just a huge "no" in my book.

Re: Unroll.me

#23
post #5

Basically a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180463 Had to search my inbox as a sanity check to make sure I hadn't signed up for the service. Turns out I hadn't, but it was pitched on Product Hunt both in April 2015 and May 2016. I'm hoping at least security folks made the mental connection that signing up meant compromising your personal emails. That's the single reason I didn't bother.

> Had to search my inbox as a sanity check to make sure I hadn't signed up for the service. Wouldn't you remember granting a third party full access to your email inbox? That doesn't seem like a trivial decision to make.

Past you isn't future you. And checking is near free.

Re: Unroll.me

#24

I looked on their website, Frequently Asked Questions, and even hovered over text like "Unroll.me is a free service" in order to find a disclosure. I could not find ANY disclosures whatsoever. Nowhere does Unroll.me disclose that they sell your emails to the highest bidder. I wish we had a FTC that could bankrupt Unroll.me's previous and current founders and executives. Absolutely despicable behaviour.

You can't sign up for the service without agreeing to the privacy policy, which is where you should expect privacy-related concerns to be discussed.

Re: Unroll.me

#25
post #18

> operating under the radar The privacy policy is clear and easy to find and understand. You can be annoyed with yourself for not reading it. You can decide the service isn't worth the tradeoffs. You can be annoyed with yourself for being naive about how free products work. But it's illogical and disingenuous to call this "under the radar" or blame the service for your own surprise about how it works. We have free wi…

> You can be annoyed with yourself for not reading it.

Do how do you spend reading every click-wrap agreement you accept?

We condition users not to read these things, so we can't be surprised when they don't read them.

Re: Unroll.me

#26
post #18

> operating under the radar The privacy policy is clear and easy to find and understand. You can be annoyed with yourself for not reading it. You can decide the service isn't worth the tradeoffs. You can be annoyed with yourself for being naive about how free products work. But it's illogical and disingenuous to call this "under the radar" or blame the service for your own surprise about how it works. We have free wi…

Few people read privacy policies. Everybody knows this. The people making this product know this. If the only place they explain it is in the privacy policy, then they are knowingly and intentionally putting it in a place where most of their users will not see it.

Re: Unroll.me

#27
post #16

I prodded unroll.me a couple of years ago about their data retention policy. Their answer was sketchy so I ended up not using the service. I'm surprised it took this long for someone with reach to look into them. Original thread: https://twitter.com/elahd/status/575692415132135425 DMs: http://imgur.com/H0UABYa

Sounds like you have great evidence for a class-action against them. If they told their users they only retain emails for 7 days, but actually kept every email in an S3 bucket that was then sold illegally to Slice, every user of Unroll.me could sue for breach of contract, damages, etc...

If you go ahead with this, let me know!

Re: Unroll.me

#29

This may sound silly, but I consider any application that requests full read access to my Gmail account to be akin to asking for my social security number. I remember when the big wave of smart email apps first came out a few years ago, and the horror was the expressed here when it was revealed that these apps basically route all of your email through their servers in order to do processing on it. Sadly at lot of the…

I think this is correct but maybe not quite far enough. I am much more willing to give out my social security number than my Gmail password.

Re: Unroll.me

#30
post #4

I don't find the practice ethical at all, but that said, don't understand why anyone would be surprised by this. Users are almost always the product. Seems like the Gruber version of outrage porn.

I disagree. If think it's the false sadness — er, "heartbreak" — expressed by the CEO in response to users being upset that angers Gruber. It's one thing to be a straight up sociopath and run your sociopathic business but quite another to pretend you care one iota about the people who you are monetizing by turning them into a personal data slurry.

By the way, folks seem to be intent on down voting your comment into oblivion. That, sadly, seems like increasingly typical behavior here, and elsewhere on the internet. The thinking seems to be: "I don't agree with your opinion therefore I will do my best to make your opinion disappear." Does that make anyone smarter? Perhaps someone was deeply, personally offended — in which case, off with your head, right?

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