Google may not read your Gmail messages, but third-party apps do

Speed Weed · September 21, 2018

Source: https://www.techradar.com/news/google-may-not-read-your-gmail-messages-but-third-party-apps-do

Quote

Google is on the defensive over potential privacy worries

Last year, Google stopped scanning your Gmail inbox in order to target personalized ads at you, but plenty of third-party apps are still able to access the content of your emails.
In some cases, developers of certain apps – for example trip planners – can be directly integrated with Gmail and granted access to utilize user data for their benefit (emails which show when you’re going away, for example, in this mentioned case).

It is a good thing that Google is on the defensive role for privacy intrusions. I hope they will let us control what data we want to send and what data we want don't want to send more.

DrMacintosh · September 21, 2018

So in other words, gmail is still bad (if you care about privacy that is) and Google is still the reason why.

They shoukdnt have ever been reading user emails to begin with and only now are they letting users decide what apps they want to be able to do that. Can a user disable access on an account level? Or does the user have to individually block apps?

If the user has to block then there is room for abuse.

Sniperfox47 · September 21, 2018

9 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

So in other words, gmail is still bad (if you care about privacy that is) and Google is still the reason why.

They shoukdnt have ever been reading user emails to begin with and only now are they letting users decide what apps they want to be able to do that. Can a user disable access on an account level? Or does the user have to individually block apps?

If the user has to block then there is room for abuse.

The user just needs to not install them >.>

These apps being referenced are the "gmail apps" within gmail, where when you go to add them it gives you a big warning saying that in order for these apps to help you with your email they will access your emails. This isn't news and has popped up a number of times now. The last time we had a tech news thread about it I grabbed screen capture of the "installation" of one of these apps to show that it explicitly and clearly states that it can access your email in the background if you enable it.