Evernote Changes Privacy Policy Over Concerns, Makes Employee Viewing an Opt-In Option

After days of controversy surrounding its upcoming privacy policy change, Evernote has decided to change it up in response to customer feedback. That change means that Evernote is “reaffirming its commitment to keep privacy at the center” of what they do and that “no employees will be reading note content” as a part of their machine learning process, unless a user chooses to opt-in. 

Previously, Evernote’s machine learning feature could only be taken advantage of if a customer was willing to let select Evernote employees view note content in rare instances. That, as you can imagine, created the sh*tstorm that Evernote has been dealing with and so they have changed to this new model. The new model appears to allow customers to still participate in the machine learning feature without the privacy worries of an Evernote employee potentially peeking at their stored content.

The change here will require Evernote to revise their privacy policy over the coming months, but that also means that they will not implement the changes scheduled for January 23, 2017.

Their CEO posted this statement to their company blog this evening:

“We announced a change to our privacy policy that made it seem like we didn’t care about the privacy of our customers or their notes. This was not our intent, and our customers let us know that we messed up, in no uncertain terms. We heard them, and we’re taking immediate action to fix it,” said O’Neill. “We are excited about what we can offer Evernote customers thanks to the use of machine learning, but we must ask for permission, not assume we have it. We’re sorry we disappointed our customers, and we are reviewing our entire privacy policy because of this.”

Finally, here is where we current stand in terms of employees viewing your content:

• Evernote employees do not and will not read your notes without your express permission.
• Evernote complies with the law in ways that keep the privacy of customer data paramount.
• Our “Three Laws of Data Protection” remain intact: your data is yours, it is protected, and it is portable.

The end.

Via:  Evernote