Google says no one reads your email, sort of

Earlier this week, a report claimed that third-party application developers could read messages from your Gmail account without your knowledge. Google now says that this is not true.

Google Authorization Screen to Access Your Account and Email Address

Google has published an article in response to the message that it does not read your e-mail messages. Third-party applications can not read your email either before you have pbaded a multi-step filtering process and obtained your consent.

Suzanne Frey, Google's director for security, trust and privacy, said: Gmail has world-clbad security features, such as protections that allow us to prevent over 99.9% Spam and phishing messages to access your inbox. In order to provide these features, we automatically process emails. "

She added that Google does not process emails to serve ads." The practice of automatic processing has led some to speculate that Google "reads" your emails, "she said. "To be absolutely clear: no one at Google reads your Gmail except in very specific cases where you ask us and give your consent, or when we need it for security reasons, such as investigating a bug or abuse. "

Before a published non-Google app can access your Gmail messages, it goes through a multi-step review process that includes an automated and manual review of the developer, an evaluation of the privacy policy of the application and home page to ensure that it is a legitimate application, and built-in tests to verify that the application is working as she says so.

In other words, the apples third parties can read messages in your Gmail account. Developers just need to get your consent first. That said, a developer might have the consent to access the information in your Google Account and read your email, but you may not realize that you have obtained permission.

Consent, however, can not be a consolation for people who have their email read by Return Path. Research company employees read some 8,000 uncensored e-mails two years ago when they were working on automation software.

Fortunately, you can control which apps can access your Google Account. It's probably worth checking to make sure you really know what – or who – is reading your email.