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    drewcrosbyKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 1:40pm

    When I start getting emails I don’t want, I find the unsubscribe link at the bottom (almost all of them have this somewhere in their email). It usually takes a week or so to completely stop getting emails from each place I unsubscribe from, and if they don’t stop, I just start marking them as spam, and they automatically start getting put in the junk folder without me ever having to see them. By being consistent with this, I get almost no unwanted spam now. It just takes a few clicks every day or two to keep up with it when there’s a new spam email showing up in the inbox. If you just delete them, they definitely won’t stop coming.

    Personally, I would never even consider a separate service to do this for me. That’s just begging for problems.

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      lewis26drewcrosby
      4/25/17 1:44pm

      So much THIS. I don’t understand how people actually needed Unroll.me.

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      Joe Jordanlewis26
      4/25/17 2:01pm

      I liked getting the single daily digest of all the “spam but not spam” messages that I may want to see. Deleting my account now, but that was my rationale.

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    TheSillyManKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 3:07pm
    How did unroll me get users to allow it to sell their inbox data

    By getting their trusted tech and lifestyle sites Gizmodo and Lifehacker to shill it for them. Some people expect the tech site they’ve been going to for years to only suggest trustworthy stuff.

    Now don’t get me wrong I don’t use it and automatically assume the worst regarding free internet services, they have to make their money somehow and its generally with your information or Ads. Does not take much of a genius to see that the inbox you give them access to would be the source of information. Whenever I use a cool free service I decide if allowing them to use my information would be worth it. To automatically unsuscribe from stuff? Not worth it.


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    JTSKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 2:31pm

    I’ve read a couple stories about this Slice/Unroll.me thing now and none of them have addressed what seems to me to be an important follow-up question: what about the Slice package-tracking app? It’s owned by the same company and also accesses your inbox to track your purchases.

    Is it fair to assume this is being sold too?

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      Kashmir HillJTS
      4/25/17 3:29pm

      Indeed. They’re somewhat more explicit about it in their privacy policy: https://www.slice.com/privacy

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    geekymitchKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 1:50pm

    “The pop-up window doesn’t even include a scroll-through box of the text you’re agreeing to; it simply offers an extra link to click if you’re motivated enough to go find it.”

    Not for nothing, you’re giving a service access to your mailbox. This is one of those times when it’s worth reading through the fine print before clicking “Accept”.

    Sorry, but I have VERY little sympathy on this one. This is your fucking mailbox. I have access to my mailbox. My wife has access to my mailbox if she ever needs it. Aint nobody else laying eyes on my mailbox, ESPECIALLY without reading the user agreement. Yeesh.

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    GriffinKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 1:49pm

    Should we stop using it?

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      Kashmir HillGriffin
      4/25/17 1:54pm

      It seems *perhaps* better to just hit the “unsubscribe” link on your emails yourself rather than giving the company inbox rights.

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      noodlesinthefaceKashmir Hill
      4/25/17 2:04pm

      Yeah, but that’s not hacking the inbox paradigm with a disruptive new technology by a Silicon Valley startup.

      Clicking your own unsubscribe link? With your own hand? Like a peasant? What kind of 20th century email nonsense is this?

      Reply
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    TiresiasKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 1:49pm

    Hey guys, your friendly neighborhood Chief Technology Officer here.

    Don’t give anything unencrypted access to your email messages other than the “Inbox” service provided by that email provider. You never want your email messages to be read by anyone but you... and your email host, but you can’t do anything about that other than “not have email”.

    Gmail, Outlook, and other similar applications are fine, but I recommend against consolidating your email accounts. That is, don’t forward your Office 365 account to your Gmail “for convenience”, especially if you use one or the other for work.

    Too much sensitive information flows through our email these days. Handle it with care.

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    SeanKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 1:52pm

    I’ll just reference this Lifehacker article from 2010, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product [being sold]”

    http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product

    It boggles me that in this day and age, people are so willing to signup their email addresses and give access to their life, for free and think they can do so without consequences- then get butthurt when someone researches what’s going on in the background and they finally learn what they did. They need to be angry at themselves, not the company that buried this information in the policy they agreed to.

    This should also be a warning to those sites that monitor your emails for price drops in items you purchase. Same thing is happening! Your store rewards cards? Same thing!

    Everything you sign up to is tracking you for analytics and to possibly sell that data (unless they explicitly say they won’t - which you have to trust). Are they selling your personal emails or private information that you share with others? likely not, but they could.

    But UnRollme was pretty smart. Most people that get loads of emails they want to be unsubscribed from never read/unchecked the “Sign me up to your marketing emails and your partners emails too!” And just blindly click yes to everything.

    You reap what you sow. If you can’t be bothered to click the unsubscribe link that is at the top/bottom of most marketing emails, but blindly sign up to a free service to do this for you, then don’t complain.  

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    GolgafrinchansKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 2:08pm

    Thanks for this. I unsubscribed from their service yesterday, but didn’t realize that I needed to revoke access to my Gmail account separately. I accepted that that unroll.me would monetize access to my inbox, but I was under the impression that they’re doing so by selling data on which emails I let through, and which emails I screen using their service. Clearly that’s I was mistaken. The problem I have with these data collection policies is that they seek broad authorization on what they can do with the collected data, rather than describing what they intend to do with it. It’s hard to give informed consent when the intended use is unclear.

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    JasonGKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 2:26pm

    I think the short answer is that it got users to allow it to sell their data by offering a useful product that was good enough that most people either ignored the TOS or accepted it knowingly.

    You know the drill, some free services are interesting but you think “eh... I dont want to give them my data.” Then there are others where you either aren’t even thinking about the data because you’re focused on the service or you make a snap decision that you *need* whatever it is they are offering.

    Always bear in mind... if there’s no profit product, then YOU are the profit product.

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    DanstansterKashmir Hill
    4/25/17 3:17pm

    That Unroll logo threw me for a loop,

    I saw this

    Image for article titled

    And then realized that I’m not on Kotaku and had to come down from this high.

    Reply