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Unroll.me

daringfireball.net

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Re: Unroll.me

#51

Post by mikeash »

gdulli wrote: post #50
mikeash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that blame should go to people who care about privacy and then don't read privacy policies. However, blame should also go to companies that hide important privacy info in privacy policies, with the full knowledge that most of their users will never see it. Given that the company here is a single entity, while their users are a disorganized mass, I think the company should bear much more responsibility for fix…

> Somebody spins a story at a gas station about how they're trying to get to Cincinnati and they just spent their last $5 on money for their sick kid and can you just help a guy out, and they manage to con some poor sucker, do we focus our ire on the con artist or on the sucker? That is just ridiculous. You're describing a lie. This situation has transparency that people have simply chosen to ignore. Fine print isn't…

Lying is about intent. When you know that people will expect a reasonable level of privacy by default, and that people won't read your privacy policy, then selling all of their data and only mentioning it in your privacy policy is also lying.

Re: Unroll.me

#52

Post by nhangen »

edw wrote: post #30
nhangen wrote: 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 o…

I get it. I just think Gruber is a hypocrite. Wasn't long ago he was invited to an Apple meeting so he could then write a blog post shilling for them.

The boundaries broken are not comparable, but I just don't feel that Gruber has any moral high ground to stand on because of his affiliation with members in the industry.

In addition, it's not like we haven't seen this act before with company CEO's. This sort of thing happens all of the time, and in every industry. He's a smart guy, but his post seems overly-reactionary.

I am less bothered by the CEO's comment than by their monetization strategy, but then again, I don't really see the need for the product in the first place.

Re: Unroll.me

#53

Post by actsasbuffoon »

Kiro wrote: post #44
jonheller wrote: post #17

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…

> akin to asking for my social security number In many countries this is public information. Why is it sacred in the US? What can you do with it?

I could try to explain, but this video does a better job than I could hope to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus

Re: Unroll.me

#54

Post by actsasbuffoon »

gdulli wrote: 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…

> The privacy policy is clear and easy to find and understand

I disagree. A casual reading of the privacy policy gives the impression that they are not selling the contents of your inbox. There's one long, awkward sentence that technically covers it, but I don't think it's obvious what they're talking about.

This is what a clear statement would look like:

We make our money by selling the contents of the emails you receive. We will make our best effort to scrub personally identifying information from your emails, though this process is difficult and maybe even impossible in some circumstances.

Re: Unroll.me

#55

Post by mtanski »

jerf wrote: post #38
jonheller wrote: post #17

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…

"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." Have you ever emailed your social security number, had your social security number emailed to you, or signed up for any sort of service to your gmail account including your paycheck management company, your tax returns, your bank, or anything else that via email…

A common way to get SSN in your email is either lease or mortgage documentation. Esp, if they send you results of any of these documents via email.
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