Looks like Google ain’t as private for users as it claims to be. Google is a household trustworthy name, but nowadays it seems the tech giant is compromising on its users’ privacy. According to the latest reports by Wall street journal, “Google continues to allow third party software developers to scan through gmail accounts”.
Google API’s are one of the most important aspects of any online based services, and Google allows hundreds of email based online services to scan through Gmail accounts. As per the report by The Verge, Google only allows data to verified developers and the user authenticated developers. However, Google stated that, even their employees do not have any access to users’ info except some special cases.
The report also suggests, email based services use various softwares to scan through Gmail accounts to find targeted audiences so they can sell the informations to marketing companies and other business firms. The data miners are also a part of the game, who are looking for the users’ data as well, and the report published on The Verge also claims that the data miners have access to various email services besides Gmail.
In the latest post release the internet giant stated, “We do not process email content to serve ads, and we are not compensated by developers for API access. Gmail’s primary business model is to sell our paid email service to organisations as a part of G-Suite,”
Google has nearly 1.4 billion active users globally. Although last year, Google already confirmed that their automated computers would stop email scanning to personalise their ads.