“The latest update to the Privacy Policy allows some Evernote employees to exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content”, Evernote said.
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As Chris O’Neill, the Chief Executive Officer at Evernote explained in a blog post published on Thursday, “trust is at the heart” of Evernote, which is why the Californian firm is committed to being transparent, listen to user feedback, and publicly admit any mistakes. Out of the gate, your document would never be read by a human; however, if you ran into issues with the feature and asked for help, then you could grant access to that specific note to a support employee to help you troubleshoot the issue.
Note-taking app Evernote said this week that some of its employees will be able to access users’ notes.
You can only encrypt text content in a note, though.
But just after a few hours, they posted another blog saying that they have chose to not implement the changes that were supposed to take effect by January 23, 2017. He joined Evernote as a heavy user of its service, and he keeps private information in his own account.
It’s unclear whether the policy update announcement will lead to a mass exodus of users. In the meantime, Evernote’s privacy policy remains unchanged. The new model appears to allow customers to still participate in the machine learning feature without the privacy worries of an Evernote employee potentially peeking at their stored content.
For those who want to leave, Evernote has a guide to deactivating your account and moving your notes to a new service. Customers can still choose to participate in the machine learning program, but they will have to do so deliberately.
Those provisions – especially responding to law enforcement requests – are common among other online service providers like Evernote.
And it still continues to migrate your data to Google’s servers.
Evernote has done the right thing quickly here, but it does make you wonder how the policy got approved and out of the door in the first place.
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According to Evernote’s terms of service, however, employees have always been able to see certain user data to comply with legal requirements, such as when there are reports of harmful or illegal content, and in order to troubleshoot. Sure, you probably don’t care because [all] you have [are] recipes, saved articles, and harmless notes, but if that’s the case, send me your Evernote username and password (and two-factor tokens) so I can look at [y] our notes.
