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Comment by modernerd | Hacker News Reader

You can opt-out of the machine learning features (which use manual human review) in your account settings at https://www.evernote.com/PersonalSettings.action.

You cannot opt-out of allowing staff to read your notes altogether, but you can export your data and move to another service.

If you don't need OCR and are on Mac/iOS, I have found Bear to be a great note-taking alternative to Evernote.

http://www.bear-writer.com/

It includes Markdown support, code syntax highlighting (for some languages), and Evernote migration:

http://www.bear-writer.com/faq/Code%20Snippets/Show%20code%2...

http://www.bear-writer.com/faq/Import/Migrate%20from%20Evern...

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For Mac, there is also Quiver. It's an upfront paid app rather than a subscription.

Support for MD and notes can be synced using iCloud.

Bear seems nice as well, hadn't heard of it before. Quite like the iOS support.

Haven't used Evernote since I moved to Quiver but will give Bear a spin as well.

I like Quiver but search is pretty bad. I wish it worked like Notational Velocity / NVAlt, but it looks like the app isn't getting regular updates (another thing that worries me a bit).

It's a shame, because in all other aspects I really like Quiver.

Opt-out of analytics should be illegal, analytics and data collection should always be opt-in and clearly described to users. This is worse than the recent homebrew analytics cafuffle.

The only way that staff reads your notes that you can't opt out of is pre-existing stuff - dealing with abuse, responding to your customer service queries, and when legally compelled to do so. You are absolutely able to opt out of the human review associated with these changes.

What about open-format exports of user data? When I leave evernote (which I need to do!) I want real ownership of my data.

I've just switched from Evernote to something else (Apple Notes) and Evernote's export format is widely supported for import into other note tools. The single file exports also include all of your binary data, and I found Apple Notes imported it all flawlessly (PDFs, images, etc).

The format is "open" and easily machine readable (it's just XML really).

I also migrated to Apple Notes after they announced that two-devices-free policy. I miss some features which made it easier to organise notes, but otherwise I'm fine.

Also, Bear is iClouded-sync.

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