Do You Care If Someone Is Reading Your Email?

For some people, they don’t really care.  For other people, it is a complete invasion of privacy.

For both groups, it is happening every day.

Apps sometimes ask for permission to read your mail.  It could be to get rid of junk mail or clean your mailbox or many other reasons, but in all cases, you MUST give the app permission in order for it to read your mail.

What is sometimes not clear is that while YOU think that means that the app is reading your email, what the developer thinks is that HE/SHE can read your email.

When the app was installed eons ago, Google popped up a dialog box something like this:

You then clicked on the Allow box and the app started working its magic.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that, for example, employees of Edison Software read the mail of hundreds of users to build a new feature.   Return Path reportedly read the emails of thousands of users.

The developers say, its in the license agreement that I am sure that you read.  NOT!

Google says Not Our Fault!  You gave the app permission.

To see who you gave those permissions to and take them away, follow these steps from Motherboard:

To see which apps you’ve given email permissions to, you can use Google’s Security Checkup for Gmail. To remove these permissions, go to your Google account settings, select “sign-in and security,” navigate to “apps with account access,” click “manage apps,” and then click on your linked apps and hit “remove access.” (Go to the bottom of the post linked at the end of this blog for step-by-step screenshots illustrating how to do this.)

But this really begs a larger question.

Think about all the apps that you have installed on your iPhone or Android phone (or the two people on the planet that are still running Windows phones).

Did you even think about the permissions that the app asked for when you installed it.  Or if it asked for permissions when you ran it.

Absent doing that, there is no telling what your apps are doing.  Reading your texts, tracking your location or who knows what else.

Of course, if you don’t care, then its not a problem.  Otherwise, you should look at the permissions that you have given the various apps that are installed.  And when you install a new app, consider whether you REALLY want that app or its developers to be reading your mail or tracking your location.

Information for this post came from Motherboard.

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