The UNROLL.Me service allowed to clean Gmail of extra subscriptions. It turned out that he sold user data

The UNROLL.Me service helped hundreds of thousands of users to cleanse email from unnecessary mailings. In the seventh year of the project, the New York Times wrote about him casually - it turned out that UNROLL.Me sold the contents of other people's letters to interested companies. A pair of proposals in the newspaper was enough for the media to be called to refuse to use the service, and his general director had to apologize and say that his heart was broken.

UNROLL.ME works like this: the user gives him access to his e -mail (it can be Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or ICLOUD), after which the service scans all incoming letters and finds mass mailings. This can be, for example, newsletters, letters from online stores or notification from social networks. Then the user can quickly unsubscribe from unnecessary mailings, as well as, if desired, start to receive a digest with excerpts from the mailings that he decided to save.

Free service appeared in 2011. He was recommended by CNET and Lifehacker , noted at the prestigious the Webby Awards. For three years, the Unroll.me audience has reached 1.3 million users. In November 2014, it was bought by Slice; Then the monetization of the service began.

The New York Times told about how she works on April 23. An article dedicated to Uber said that the taxi call service bought accounts from Slice, which Lyft, a competitor to Uzra, sent him to the mail to his customers.

The newspaper emphasized that data from UNROLL.ME were depersonalized before sale. Despite this, many service users were outraged by the fact that their data is trading. The journalist Glenna Greenwald released a note with the heading with the heading “Stop using UNROLL.ME right now. The service sold your Uber data. " An instruction appeared on CNET, explaining how to delete your account in the unroll.me.

The dissatisfaction of users was so strong that the co -founder and general director of UNROLL.ME Jojo Hedia had to speak in the service blog with the post “We can be better”. Hedia wrote that "it was heartbreaking to see the indignation of some users who learned how we monetize our free service." He never mentioned that user data are sold to third -party companies, but admitted that the company needs to tell you more clearly how it earns money.

“Everything else will be the old way: we will provide a service that will save you several hours of life and at the same time protect your data,” Khedia wrote on the blog. At the same time, at the HackerNews forum, the web developer Karl Katska said that the company he worked in more than three years ago wanted to buy UNROLL.Me, but abandoned this idea, since the service had security problems-he kept copies of all letters of his users on poorly protected servers. In a conversation with The Intercept, Katsk said that his information should be perceived as "rumors of third parties based on rumors based on rumors."

The statement of Karl Katska in UNROLL.Me is called "one hundred percent untruth."

On Twitter, the company continues to convince users that everything is in order. The company, in particular, said : "Gmail knows much more about you than us."

Sultan Suleimanov