The IT Nerd

Yesterday, I posted that Evernote had a privacy policy that allowed their employees to see your data. You could opt out of that, but you’d get a different user experience and their employees would still see your data. At the time I said this:

In the meantime, if I were Evernote I would be trying to clarify this right now as I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on here. But from an optics perspective, it could be spun that way. And that’s not good for Evernote.

Enter Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill. He has shared a note to clarify the situation:

If you choose to participate in these experimental features, you’ll enjoy a more personalized experience. Select Evernote employees may see random content to ensure the features are working properly but they won’t know who it belongs to. They’ll only see the snippet they’re checking. Not only that, but if a machine identifies any personal information, it will mask it from the employee.

So, they see data, but they don’t know who it belongs to. That makes me feel marginally better. Though I am sure the possibility exists that they might see something that they can connect the dots on where it might have come from. Regardless, this seems halfway reasonable. And for the record, Evernote still remains committed to its Three Laws of Data Protection.

My take? If they put that in what they posted a day or two ago, this might not have blown up. Hopefully they have learned from this and I hope others who are potentially in their situation learn from this too.

This entry was posted on December 15, 2016 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Evernote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.