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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, 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... (non-Medium: https://outline.com/7K3TAL )
From their T&C's page "you may provide us with information about your contacts (such as names, email addresses, etc.)" Whoever installs this app consents to sharing the information of their contacts, who might not consent to having their data shared. Ultimately, this could lead to giving disposable contact details to friends and relatives, in order to (try to) preserve one's privacy.
That's a tough problem to solve, "Import your Address Book" has been a feature of communications platforms as far back as I can remember.
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... (non-Medium: https://outline.com/7K3TAL )
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...
>Edison Are there really no good open source email clients on iphones?
Also, there's no way to change your default mail client, so that makes it somewhat less likely that we'd see someone develop one of these.
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... (non-Medium: https://outline.com/7K3TAL )
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 the…
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.
People should really read the privacy policies before using any email app these days. Many popular ones state that they, at minimum, will keep access tokens on their servers, and many outright cache copies of your messages.
It seems it's time again for the reminder that if you aren't paying you are the product, not the customer. I don't understand how people don't understand this in 2020, after at least 2 decades of this nonsense. Or do they just not care?
The HN title of this article, cf. the true title on the vice.com web page, fails to consider that this article is also about the companies that sell data derived from scraping the contents of email. Arguably the sellers are more interesting here as they are the ones doing the scraping and creating the market.
I asked about a similar problem [3] on a "Who's Hiring" last week to a YC-funded company and dang was quick to detach that comment, as it was off-topic for the context of the thread.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus-se...