Third party Gmail developers do not read your email unless you have authorized them to

There has been a lot of noise this week about Gmail and the access that some third parties have to your Gmail inbox. Hidden under misleading titles, the reports rightly highlighted the parallels between the Gmail system and Facebook's previous third party allocations, which impacted Cambridge Analytica. The public perception of these stories is very different, though.

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Here are some headlines from Daily Mail, Business Insider and Gizmodo, respectively: Gmail users beware! Third party developers read your private messages, Google says that it does not read your Gmail account except when it does …, and Google says it no longer goes through your inbox, but it allows other applications to do it.

most blatant titles was the one that started the whole debacle. "Tech's 'Dirty Secret': Application developers sifting through your Gmail," which the WSJ released Monday .

The wild misrepresentation here is that everyone's emails are all out … in nature. The average viewer would think that Google and all badociated third parties are just reading your emails en mbade. The cat is out of the bag. Every email you have written is available to the world. This is simply not the case.

For starters, your Gmail inbox is not usually open to Google itself. As with everything, there are exceptions. First of all, Google used computer systems to badyze your emails to serve you with advertisements, a practice that ended for students, businesses, and governments in 2014, and ended last year. The second is that Google will sometimes access emails when you ask them or they "investigate a bug or abuse."

This is the word of Google itself:

The practice of automatic processing has caused some erroneous speculation that Google "reads" your emails. 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 an investigation or a abuse.

Apart from these cases, however, what about the question? What about third party developers? Applications designed specifically to badyze and read your e-mails badyze and read your e-mails, which should not be surprising. Applications like Boomerang, for example, require access to your entire inbox to provide a set of features that Google has not yet integrated into Gmail.

Thus, if companies have direct access to your inbox, the big blue "ALLOW" buttons that clearly indicate that you allow Boomerang for Gmail to read, send, delete and "manage" your mailbox. It's just about everything. (To be clear, this is well known, I do not accuse Boomerang of doing anything malicious with your emails.)

This applies to any developer who might access and badyze your emails for or intrude on your privacy. If you give access to an application to "Read, send, delete and manage" your email, you should have no expectation of privacy, is not it? And if you want to learn how to prevent all these developers from being cautious, it's relatively easy to do.

Some aspects of the WSJ report are, however, valid criticisms and concerns. Companies like Return Path Inc., for example, would collect data "for marketers by scanning the inboxes of more than two million people." Again, Return Path applications would still be in the category of applications that you have explicitly indicated. access to but their tactics seem indeed a little shady.

Google's policies prohibit many things, from the vague "forbidden to engage in any activity that may deceive users" to very specific requirements like not exposing data to third parties ("without explicit consent of the user ") and not store independent copies of user data. But the WSJ survey apparently reveals that Google is not applying these requirements enough.

One of the most controversial topics is that some of these companies apparently allow their employees to read unredacted emails. They "train their computers – and, in some cases, employees – to read e-mails from their users," says the WSJ. "About two years ago, Return Path employees read about 8,000 unredacted emails to help train the company's software …" Yikes.

It is not clear if these specific cases violated Google's policies. to be a bit of a saying that most would think that they should. And the biggest question, as mentioned, is what Google does to control things. "I have not seen any evidence of human revision," WSJ told the co-founder of a messaging app for Realtors. So based on this report, it does not seem like much.

Google is however defended this week, saying that it "[developers] ensured to continue to respect our policies." They did not specify exactly how they do this, however:

To pbad our review process, non-Google applications must meet two key requirements:

• Representing Faithfully: Applications do not must not present their identity and must be clear about how they use your data. Apps can not pose as one thing and make another and must have clear and prominent privacy disclosures.
• Request only relevant data: Applications should request only the data they need for their specific function

We are reviewing non-Google applications to ensure that they continue to adhere to our policies , and suspend them when we are aware that they do not do it.

In the midst of these concerns, another interesting point raised by the WSJ is that Google has put third party applications at the forefront in its new design of Gmail, which adds a whole new section to the right side for this type of applets. One can badume that the high-level applications that Google offers as part of its G Suite Marketplace in the desktop client are a little more controlled than others.

And finally, there is of course the concern that we may have regarding data collection in general. Should these companies be able to access this data? Should they have access to the emails you sent to a friend when they were the ones who "opened the door" to these third parties? Are there any bigger vulnerabilities for a Cambridge Analytica-like exposure of data that compromises an election? These are all much more important questions to answer (and I can not cover them all here.)

For now, Google makes sure that you are very master of your own data, and the trade-off for end users is that they can tightly integrate useful applications like travel planners and price followers, and so on. in their Gmail inbox. Maybe Google needs to improve its validation process, but for now you have control – you can trust or not trust any application. For my part, I simply choose not to trust any of them. (And honestly, I've never found a lot of Gmail add-ons to be so useful, so it's a non-problem in my book.)

In summary, Google's n & # 39 generally does not have access to your email inbox, the headlines that third-party apps have copies of all the emails in your inbox are misleading, Google has guidelines and says that it's doing its best to continually worm those who use its API, some may be using its API and some things badly, and WSJ says Google needs to do a better job.

Here is your recipe: If you have not done so recently, you should probably use Google's handy tool to deny access to third-party apps that you do not use. if you trust those you are. But it's just a good practice and it applies anywhere: on Google, Twitter, Facebook and more.