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Starting Next Year, Evernote Employees Could Access Your Unencrypted Notes (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the privacy-woes dept.

Mark Wilson, reporting for BetaNews: Evernote has published an update to its Privacy Policy, revealing that as of 23 January 2017, employees will be able to access unencrypted notes. The change is being wheeled in because of the apparent failings of machine learning. Perhaps more worrying is the fact that Evernote says that it is not possible to opt out of having employees possibly accessing your unencrypted notes. The only way to fully protect your privacy is to delete all your notes and close your Evernote account. The update to the Privacy Policy starts off sounding fairly innocuous: "The latest update to the Privacy Policy allows some Evernote employees to exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content, subject to the limits described below, for the purposes of developing and improving the Evernote service."

7 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Cloud services should be renamed by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Maybe a better name would be Looking Glass services.

    1. Re: Cloud services should be renamed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's exactly right. As we see, any promises made in the terms of service and privacy policies aren't worth the electrons they're written on and we should have no expectation of privacy in our cloud accounts.

      We, the consumer, are just cattle to be exploited.

  2. Machine learning? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What possible legitimate use have a company that is in the business of storring small text files on behalf of their customers of machine learning? None! That's all, they are not providing any other service nor their customers are asking them to!

  3. Migration path? by layabout · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've tried Google keep, Microsoft one note, personal wikis but nothing seems to function as well as Evernote. The ability to access the same data, without explicit synchronization steps on tablet, phone, and laptop is a core value of Evernote. What's the alternative?

  4. Re:What note solution? by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is a note solution I use called "Sticky"

  5. Re:What note solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    So you think that with a couple hundred employees, many of which would not have this access at all (accounting, marketing, sales, low-level peons, designers, customer service, reception, etc), and over 200 million users that your notes are going to get read? Very unlikely. No different than your email. It can be read by the server administrator. I was accused more than once by co-workers that we in IT read their email. We don't, we don't have time and don't give a shit, unless their boss asked us to.

    If you think ANY cloud service is going to offer real, true privacy, you're not living in reality. That is just not today's reality, maybe in the future, but surely not today.

  6. It still seems VERY abusive to me. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They know most people won't understand that.