Earlier there has been a monitoring of Gmail and private accounts for advertisement campaigns and advertisement targeting purposes by Google, the largest search engine. They promised to stop the scanning inboxes of Gmail users but is it the end to secure our privacy? The latest report says, NO.
The report states that Google still lets third-party app developers to access the information of the users and also read your private messages. “Many of the companies use algorithms to trawl through the emails and access the information. In some companies they may let their own employees read and examine them”, reports The Wall street journal.
The journal spots two companies mainly doing this practice. One is the Return-path, an app that uses the Gmail account, Microsoft Corp and yahoo email address for signing up one of the free apps in its Partners network. It is also claimed that in the last two years the employees of Return Path had read almost 8000 emails in the testing of the company’s software.
Another firm that does this scanning of private details is the Edison Software that makes the Edison Mail app for IOS. They are also claimed for accessing the information of users for testing their own app called “smart reply”.
Both the companies stated that this practice is being given in the user agreements and also their app asks for the user consent before the login but often they don’t make explicitly make the user aware that a human will be reading through their emails. The permission granted by the users is the reason why Google provides data to the outside developers in which companies use this permission to access the user’s private emails. And also Google made it clear that in special cases mainly for security purposes such as investigating a bug or abuse they use to access the information.
You can able to know if a third party accessed your Gmail account by heading to MY ACCOUNT page in Gmail and log in.