The IT Nerd

This has been an interesting week for Evernote. After having a privacy policy change come to light that highlighted the fact that they could have access to their data to make sure that their machine-learning efforts were working as designed. Predictably that blew up and their CEO tried to make it go away by clarifying things.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this attempt to clarify things didn’t go over too well because the company is now walking back this change to their privacy policy:

After receiving a lot of customer feedback expressing concerns about our upcoming Privacy Policy changes over the past few days, Evernote is reaffirming its commitment to keep privacy at the center of what we do. As a result, we will not implement the previously announced Privacy Policy changes that were scheduled to go into effect January 23, 2017.

Instead, in the coming months we will be revising our existing Privacy Policy to address our customers’ concerns, reinforce that their data remains private by default, and confirm the trust they have placed in Evernote is well founded. In addition, we will make machine learning technologies available to our users, but no employees will be reading note content as part of this process unless users opt in. We will invite Evernote customers to help us build a better product by joining the program.

My take on this goes something like this. I don’t think there was anything sinister going on here. I think what Evernote was trying to do was provide full disclosure in terms of what it was doing. Plus, this policy was already in effect. Thus this was going on and the only reason planet Earth found out about it is because Evernote themselves brought it to light when they tried to change their privacy policy. I am thinking that if Evernote communicated this better from the start and perhaps made this an opt in option from the start, we wouldn’t be talking about this now. Having said that, one has to wonder if the damage to Evenote’s reputation cause by this mess is something that they can recover from.

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.

Evernote is a popular tool that allows you to take notes, create to-do lists, and save things you find online. Plus it syncs with all your devices. Sounds great right? What’s not so great is the fact that they have a privacy policy that has been around for some time which allows their employees to read your notes. This issue came to light when a notification came out about an upcoming update to the policy:

The latest update to the Privacy Policy allows some Evernote employees to exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content, subject to the limits described below, for the purposes of developing and improving the Evernote service.

This is primarily to make sure that our machine learning technologies are working correctly, in order to surface the most relevant content and features to you. While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should.

Then there is this:

I really don’t like this change and don’t want Evernote employees to see my notes. What are my options?

While we think machine learning is a great tool that will help you get the most out of your Evernote experience, we understand that not everyone feels the same way. If you would prefer to opt out of machine learning technologies on your content (including some which require some human review for oversight purposes), you can do so in your account settings, where it says, “Allow Evernote to use my data to improve my experience.” If you do opt out, however, you may not be able to get the most out of your Evernote experience. And please note that you cannot opt out of employees looking at your content for other reasons stated in our Privacy Policy (under the section, “Does Evernote Share My Personal Information or Content?”).

If you wish, you also can decide to export your data and leave the Evernote service by following these steps. We would hate to see you go, though, especially when we continue to have so many exciting new developments to share with you!

So if I have confidential info in Evernote, as a lot of companies do because I know a lot of companies who use Evernote, I will in effect get a different user experience if I opt out of this. Hmmmm…. That’s a bit of a downer. And on top of that, I still can’t keep Evernote employees from looking at my stuff.

To be fair, Evernote isn’t giving the ability to read your data to all of its employees. It’s only a limited set will have the necessary privileges to access customer data. And this policy as I mentioned above isn’t new. It’s just come to light recently because the company highlighted it. But that doesn’t really make me feel better. And I am sure that those who are the paranoid sort may be looking at other options such as Apple Notes in more recent versions of OS X/macOS or Microsoft OneNote.

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.