Companies that buy data derived from scraping the contents of email

I am having trouble parsing that out, why would they be extracting 'anonymous' purchase information from 'automatically recognize[d] commercial emails' if they care about protecting privacy... ?

"we had to destroy the village in order to save it"

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-09/destro...

That's an amazing level of marketing doublespeak right there. Protecting my privacy by reading my emails? Right, pull the other one.

That's a painfully shameful attempt to conceal malicious practice.

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 they could just run an ad platform that blocks malvertisements...

WeChat killed their web interface for most users and replaced it with a message that translates to: "For your own account safety, this account cannot use the web version. You can use the Windows or Mac client [download links]"

Safety? Web is about as safe as it gets. It's one thing to spy on users but it's a whole another thing for Tencent to masquerade under the name of safety to cheat users into downloading what could quite possibly be spyware. That's not only spying but also spreading false information about computer security to the masses.

A colleague of mine is attending a conference this week where attendees are 'required' to install an app to their personal phones so that they can get the latest updates to changes to the conference agenda.

No doubt this is a data-mining platform marketed to conference organizers who probably don't have much of a clue what the real value add is for the app creator.

I have strongly encouraged them to not install the 'app'.

Well... no shit? If you gave someone permissions to read your emails, obviously they can read your emails. And because they can read it, they can also copy your emails and/or share it with other companies. This isn't something that can be stopped by google.

On an opt-in basis, which seems fine. A lot of people want email activity being fed to some other tool like CRM or call center software.

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.

My lack of trust is the sole reason I never had email on my phone until a few months ago. I moved to ProtonMail and I use their app (which is great). I trust them. It's possible I'm wrong, but I know how they make money and if I use them long enough I'll be a paying customer when my free space runs out. They also open-sourced their codebase and I have a friend in law enforcement who has delivered warrants to them and they truly don't keep any data or have access to emails at all.

Most privacy policies are in legalese, and hard experience has shown that what I, as a non-lawyer, think they say is quite often very different from what they actually say.

As a result, I gave up bothering to read them unless they're one or two paragraphs long. I simply assume they say what 90% of them really say: they can take any data they like, do whatever they like with it, and they can unilaterally change the agreement any time they want.

Even if you trust them on privacy or are willing to let them analyze your emails in exchange for some feature, there are very few companies that I trust to handle my email securely.

If a hacker gained access to my Gmail access tokens, they're a password reset link away from taking over most of my other online accounts and probably more than a few banking accounts. And then deleting the password reset emails.

Having worked for large and small companies (including ones that handle emails), security is always second (or third) compared to other business priorities. It takes a large effort to make sure everything is locked down and most companies don't have the skills, resources, and commitment to properly secure everything even if they nominally claim that security is important.

And if you're paying for something on the internet, there is a good chance that you are the product.

The app review process can be very time-consuming. I imagine this is at least part of the reason there are not more open-source apps on iOS.

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.

Someone changed the title. The original submission title matched the article title [1]. Feels like an intentional re-characterization to place the blame on the ones purchasing the data, as opposed to the ones harvesting and selling. This journalist is the same who exposed Jumpshot [2] for similar tactics (selling highly-sensitive user-level data), and a few days later the entire company (~230 employees) shut down.

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...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229267