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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

"Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. "

Can someone explain to me the mechanics of how this happens? I use Lyft, which emails me a receipt. How does Slice get a hold of this? Does Lyft sell it to Slice?

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It's pretty sleazy.

See https://unroll.me

It purports to be a convenient tool for end users. But sells them out for revenue.

Edit: I'm sure it's in the terms somewhere. But to me, something this intrusive should be stated up front if it's not obvious.

Pretty sleazy indeed.

Honest question (not trolling, I swear), is Gmail any different? I guess (I'm guessing though?) google doesn't sell users' info to third parties? (But I guess it does use the info within alphabet companies??) Does anyone know this for sure?

It's at least easy to find out what's Google's policies are, in layman's terms: https://privacy.google.com/how-ads-work.html I don't know how well they link to this sort of thing during sign up for services.

People that use Unroll.me grant it access to their Gmail account for its newsletter bundling feature. However Gmail permissions aren't fine-grained about only allowing them access to certain senders so Unroll.me has access to all email. While they are in your email, they sneakingly check everything in your inbox, even senders that you have not rolled up, and share "anonymized" data. This is my hunch of what they're doing given the input / output they have, but none of us can really know exactly without seeing the code. They're also tweeting a lot today trying to convince people that they scan one's inbox in good conscious.

"Unroll.Me is a free service". Looks like people forward their email to unroll.me which creates a digest version of all your Facebook notifications or something.

(From unroll.me's copy on their front page)

Instantly see a list of all your subscription emails. Unsubscribe easily from whatever you don’t want.

Unroll.Me is a free service

So they analyse an inbox, and siphon the data in the process.

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