Google lets app developers access personal emails
Google is allowing hundreds of companies to scan people’s Gmail accounts, read their emails and even share their data with other firms, the company has confirmed.
In a letter to US senator Susan Molinari, Google’s vice-president for public policy in the Americas admitted that it lets app developers access the inboxes of millions of users – even though Google itself stopped looking in 2017.
In some cases, human employees have manually read thousands of emails in order to help train AI systems perform the same task.
The disclosure has echoes of last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which political consultants covertly harvested data from 87m Facebook users through a thirdparty quiz app.
The letter, first reported by The Wall Street Journal yesterday, also confirms app developers can and do share the data with other companies – as long as Google believes their privacy policies make this clear enough.
‘‘Developers may share data with third parties so long as they are transparent with the users about how they are using the data,’’ said Molinari. Google, she said, takes steps to ensure companies’ privacy policies are ‘‘easily accessible for users’’.
App developers can access Gmail data, including names, subject lines, message text and email signatures, to offer price comparison, travel planning and market research.
Most scanning is done by computers, but some is performed by human employees who check the AI is doing its job.
In one incident, employees at a company named Return Path read 8000 unredacted emails to train AI, which collects data for marketers.
Google itself mined users’ emails for personal data to target its advertising, but stopped in 2017 after a class-action lawsuit accused it of illegal wiretapping. Company executives will testify next week before the US Senate’s commerce committee. – Telegraph Group