Keith Smith - My Blog

Evernote snooping

Wednesday, December 14, 2016 - by Keith A. Smith

Evernote announced an upcoming change to its privacy policy that would allow company employees to “exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content” to improve the service.


Evernote’s privacy changes will take effect Jan. 22, 2017 and users are threatening to abandon the service. A few years ago Dropbox also made changes to it's privacy policy to allow it's staff to snoop around in your stuff.


The policy changes have to do with machine learning, which Evernote says it is using to “help get you the most out of your Evernote experience.”


According to the company’s policy update notice, "Only employees who are fulfilling one of the customer or business needs... will be able to access your data.” Evernote claims a limited number of employees who have undergone background checks will be able to access user data and that users can encrypt notes to prevent employees from reading them.


I said it once, and I'll say it again if you upload data, virtual machines, etc. to any cloud provider you essentially have transferred ownership of that data the cloud provider simply allows you to access it. It is imperative that everyone implement encryption and Multi-factor authentication (MFA) also known as (also known as 2FA) where ever possible.


I also recommend that everyone use the EULAlyzer to analyze end user license agreements for interesting words and phrases in order to make sense of the nonsensical agreements.


-End
  Share Post   

View Comments Comments


Leave a Comment