Do you know that your Gmail messages may be accessed without your knowledge?

If Google has cut the targeted advertising in emails and stopped scanning the 1.4 billion Gmail boxes for advertising purposes, that does not mean that no one has access to it. On the contrary, the number of companies able to put their nose in the emails of users continues to grow, as revealed by a survey of The Wall Street Journal. How? Through programming interfaces that Google makes available to developers. There would be several hundred third-party publishers capable of scanning Gmail messages for additional services, such as message sorting, context notification, or writing badistance.

These programming interfaces have been available since long time and anyone can use them as part of an online application or service. For example, they allow iOS messaging to retrieve and display Gmail messages. They are also used by dozens of extensions that Gmail has been offering since the release of the latest version. Obviously, the user must give his consent for this third party access to be put in place. The problem is that the user is not always well informed about the actual treatment that is reserved for his messages.

Access created in a quiet way

Some companies, for example, take advantage of this access to to benefit others. This is the case of the Earny service, which detects invoices in Gmail and other couriers and then provides a price comparison with other products. Earny also gives access to Return Path, a company specializing in e-mail marketing that takes the opportunity to find out if its campaigns are effective and, why not, take a look at the campaigns of its competitors. Earny is not the only service to give access to Return Path. The latter has 162 other partners doing the same thing. All this is indicated in the conditions of use, texts that no one really reads.

What is even more disturbing is that users' emails are not only scanned by the software of these companies, but also read by their employees as part of the development and debugging of a product for example. In 2016, to improve its algorithms, Return Path sent two badysts who extracted 8000 messages from the Gmail databases to read them and badign them clbadification labels. The crux of this story is that this clbadification effort was intended to fix a bug that made Return Path scan not only the emails of its campaigns, but also the personal messages of users.

Gmail n ' is not better than Facebook

According to the WSJ, publisher Edison, which offers optimization tools for couriers, is also engaged in this kind of practice. Its employees read users' e-mails as part of, for example, developing new features. Whether it's Return Path or Edison, users never knew their messages were read by people they did not know. A situation that, it seems, is far from an exception. "Some may think it's face-down [de ce secteur]. But this is the reality " explains Thede Loder, a competitor of Return Path who confesses to having done the same thing, before having put an end to it.

With regard to these practices, one wonders if Gmail will not soon replace Facebook on the podium of the biggest scandals related to the protection of personal data!