Do you know who has access to your email (and what they're doing with it)?
I read the following line in this article at Mashable, and it gave me pause:
Baydin recently extracted data from five million emails its users handled — either using the company’s “email game” or scheduled for later via Boomerang.
The article is about a study Baydin did on the effectiveness of various words in email subject lines. But to do this study, they analyzed the text in all the email they are handling through their various email services. Boomerang, referenced above, is an add-on service to Gmail that allows users to “snooze” messages out of their inbox and have them return at a later time.
While I’m sure users are explicitly giving Baydin the right to access their email to enable this service, I doubt they are expecting them to collect statistics on the content of their emails.
Just because it’s possible to do so and technically within their rights doesn’t make it the right thing to do. I think Baydin made an error in judgement here.
