Unroll.me, an Email Unsubscribe Service, Collects and Sells Your Data
Yesterday, The New York Times detailed some of Uber’s questionable business practices . In one small section of the article, it was revealed that one service that we’ve talked about a lot over the years, Unroll.me , is mining and selling your email data, and Uber used that data to get information about Lyft.
In this case, Uber bought data collected from one company to give it an edge over its competitor Lyft. Here’s some background information in the Times:
They have spent most of their energy outrunning rivals like Lyft. Uber has dedicated teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from analytics service Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service she owns called Unroll.me , Slice collected email receipts from Lyft from their inboxes and sold anonymous data to Uber. Uber used this data as a measure of the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft also has a competitive intelligence group.)
Slice has confirmed it is selling anonymous data (meaning no customer names are included) based on ride receipts from Uber and Lyft, but declined to disclose who is buying the information.
Slice Intelligence is a data collection and analysis service in this service. It turns out he also owns Unroll.me, a service that makes it easy to unsubscribe from mailings you don’t need and which we’ve recommended a few times , as well as Slice , a package tracking app that happens to be our favorite app for doing this on Android and iPhone .
When you look at the Privacy Policy of both (here Privacy Policy for Slice and here Privacy Policy for Unroll.me ), it becomes clear that they collect and sell your anonymous data, but most of us probably never bothered about please read this Privacy Policy and do not think about what this data can be used for other than the usual “improvements to our service”. We now have one example: competitive intelligence, also known as a very boring form of corporate espionage.
As for Unroll.me, they released a statement as apologetic as a drunk who just pissed on your carpet and then accused you of not telling them where the bathroom was. It opens with this link of the line:
[It] hurt [me] to see that some of our users were upset about how we were monetizing our free service.
Unroll.me and Slice are certainly not the only similar services we’ve talked about over the years. Throttle works similar to Unroll.me and their privacy policy is currently a 404 page ( Update: Throttle backs up, and while they collect some data, they don’t sell it), Unsubscribr is another one that seems to have stopped completely work, and many other email applications and services can get similar access to your accounts. If you connect any third-party services, especially free ones, to your email, you might assume that they are mining your data for something.
We’ve known how it works for a long time: if you don’t pay for it, you are a product , but that doesn’t mean it’s no surprise how Uber used that data. This is also surprisingly clever, albeit very rude.
If you want to delete your Unroll.me account, the process is pretty simple:
- Log into Unroll.me .
- Click the drop-down menu in the upper right corner.
- Click “Settings”.
- Scroll down and click Delete my account.
Now is probably the time to go through an audit of any other services you have connected to your email accounts. There’s a good chance you’ve hooked on something over the years to help clear your inbox clutter. Assuming you are using Gmail, you can always go to the related apps section of your Google account and delete the services that you have associated with Gmail.