A new report from today dives into a few iOS and Mac email apps/services that aren’t being very transparent about selling users’ personal data. Notably, one of them is even in Apple’s App Store ranked in the top 100 for productivity apps.
: Edison has responded to the report, as well as sharing how to opt-out of data sharing. See the full statement below.
The first email app highlights in its report as using scraping to sell personal data is Edison. While the developer says on its website that it does “process” its users’ emails, Edison customers that interviewed said they didn’t realize what was happening.
And when looking at the big picture, Edison having phrases like “privacy by design” and “privacy first” on its website can feel misleading after learning about how they scrape and sell personal data.
“They could definitely be a bit more upfront about their commercial intents,” Seb Insua, a Edison user who said they were unaware of the data selling, told Motherboard. “Their website is all like ‘No Ads’ and ‘Privacy First’,” he added (the company’s website says “Edison Trends practices privacy by design.”)
learned specifics in a J.P. Morgan document about how Edison pitches selling personal email data to companies:
That document describes Edison as providing “consumer purchase metrics including brand loyalty, wallet share, purchase preferences, etc.” The document adds that the “source” of the data is the “Edison Email App.”
Notably, Edison is ranked as the 58th most popular productivity app on the App Store with a 4.6/5 star average rating.
also discovered that two other popular email apps/services are using the same practice of scraping and selling user’s email data, Cleanfox and Slice.
COO for Foxintelligence (Cleanfox’s parent company) told they see selling user data as good for consumers and companies…
“From a higher perspective, we believe crowd-sourced transaction data has a transformational power both for consumers and for companies and that a marketplace where value can be created for both sides without making any compromise on privacy is possible,” Foxintelligence Chief Operating Officer Florian Cleyet-Merle told Motherboard in an email.
Some users might not mind their inboxes being scraped and data sold in exchange for free apps/services but transparency is key for customers to be able to make the best decision.
Check out the full report on these email apps/services here.
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Edison has shared more specifics on its approach to providing a free email service without ads, how it scrapes email data anonymously, and how to opt-out in a Medium post.
To keep our Edison Mail app free, and 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. Our technology is designed to ignore personal and work email, which does not help us measure market trends.
Edison puts privacy first in everything we do as a company and that includes making our users aware of how we use their data in our products. You have complete control over how your information is used and we allow you to opt-out of data sharing in our research product, without impacting your app experience. We strive to be as transparent as possible about our business practices in our press communications, Edison Mail website, Edison Trends website, privacy policy, blog posts, on our app store pages, on social media, and of course, in our app itself. We do not participate in any ad targeting of our users and do not allow others to do ad targeting of our users.
We intentionally keep our consumer and business products under a single brand to ensure that our consumer users are familiar with our business model.
Our mission is to provide an independent and free email app that is NOT backed by an ad-based business model. There are two reasons why this mission is critical — 1) consumers need to have a choice for a free email app and 2) users have a right to privacy.
Our research-backed business model allows us to provide a privacy-focused and viable free email app that consumers want. We discuss this further on our blog.
We launched our Edison Trends e-commerce research product that provides insights about shopping trends from aggregated and anonymized transaction data extracted with permission from our Edison Mail app users. Research from Edison Trends is often used by the nation’s leading press reporting on retail trends — including outlets like The Wall Street Journal, PCMag, Bloomberg, and more. Our Edison Trends research has been cited in more than 1,500 press articles in the past three years. Anyone — including users of Edison Mail — can read about Edison Trends research in the news almost daily. You can see examples of the research we create from the data we collect on our research page and in the following chart.
The use of anonymized data for research to facilitate learning is a wide practice used by many types of organizations — from the U.S. Census, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), banks, credit card companies and more. Edison Mail users have the option, at any time, to opt-out of data sharing for Edison Trends research or delete any data we collect with no impact to their app experience.
In 2018, our email app and business model was mentioned in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an article referencing how our app allows users to opt-out of data sharing in our research at will.
Stay Informed
Our team at Edison also hopes that press and consumers alike will take the time to learn more about companies like us to better understand how data is being used, and which players are truly worth that wariness vs those that are working hard to offer great products in a transparent manner, without infringing on their own user’s privacy.
As an email app, we hope all of our users understand the access they allow when they connect us to their accounts in order for us to keep the app free, independant and ad-free. We use that access to provide our services and build new AI-enabled email features. We communicate that clearly, our users always had to give us permission, and have the ability to opt-out of data sharing for research at any time.
We continue to put privacy first at Edison Software — we do not target our users for ads and we actively prevent other companies from tracking them in our app. We want to point you to our overview of all the privacy standards we have in place at Edison.
We thank and appreciate all our Edison Mail users, and we strive every day to create the best independent email app, without sacrificing your privacy.
Author: Michael Potuck.
Source: 9TO5Mac
