Yes, Google still reads your emails. What’s worse is they’re not the only ones.
Last year, Google caved and agreed to stop using content scanned from your emails to target the ads they put in front of you in the sidebar. This shouldn’t have felt like a huge victory for two reasons:
1. Business accounts already had that specific privacy standard, so it wasn’t a huge leap in Google’s privacy revolution to apply it to individual users.
2. Third-party developers are reading your emails!
In 2014, Google created a range of application programming interfaces (APIs). This streamlined the process of Gmail and Gcal accounts communicating with the software of the other apps you use. The catch is, not only does the software have access to your Gmail account, so do the software’s developers.
Google’s privacy policy and opt-in messages for external apps state that information may be shared with third parties. These policies do not specifically mention that it will be people manually looking at this information.
The developers of the companies that build the apps that talk to your Google accounts use data from your emails to enhance existing apps, build new features, and develop new software. For example, Wall Street Journal found out that Edison Software employees looked at the emails of hundreds of users for these purposes.
Developers also view email content for the purpose of developing methods of training software. For example, Return Path made use of Gmail user emails to develop training methods to teach its software the difference between commercial emails and personal emails. Return Path takes it a step farther and shares access to user information with companies they partner with via Return Path’s subsidiary Context.IO. This subsidiary uses email data it collects to further develop its services. Its partner Earny, for example, now also has access to users’ email data. Earny is an app that helps save money by looking for claims refunds and receipts in users’ email content.
While there is a clear opt-out, so technically its the user’s “fault” if their data gets shared to partners of third parties through the subsidiaries of the original third party that owns an app on their device, this web of access to personal information is ladened with legalese, convoluted, and confusing. While it is technically legal, it’s clearly unreasonable.
Ideally, it’s on software companies to take responsibility for the data security of their consumers. Realistically, it’s on you to know who is reading your emails, be it a robot or a human. The good news is, you don’t have to plough through the web of transitive relationships and purposefully misleading privacy policy wording yourself. If you have any doubts about privacy policies or practices of your service providers, a PI can do the legwork for you! Contact me at Mignolet@bellsouth.net.