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.
This is the way it should have been handled from the beginning. I’m glad Evernote came to their senses and made this an opt-in feature.
I was having a hard time organizing the notes I imported into OneNote. So glad to hear this!
Too late. Already moved and deactivated account.
They are doing nothing different than Google and they get reamed. Kellen, you made a mountain out of a mole hill.
Yes they were doing different than Google. They said notes were private and then said they were not. Google has always said they use the data. I trust Google, I am not so sure about Evernote. I have used Evernote for many years and am not sure if I will ever trust them again. So I don’t think Kellen was making a mountain out of a mole hill. I felt the same way when Facebook started putting extra programs on my phone many years ago. I deleted Facebook from my phone and never installed it again. What Evernote was doing was even worse than facebook.
Google does it with ai and bots. Evernote literally has an employee rummaging through your crap.
Just as I suspected would happen, the backlash has been too much, they have backed off of and canceled the new policy:
https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/15/evernote-drops-policy-change/
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Too late, already deleted the few notes I had and deactivated my acccount. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, really, given all the restrictions they’ve implemented for free accounts recently.
I already deleted my account. Just in case.
Super duper paranoid ehh?
So basically they go back to how it was before where they could read your notes — just without you knowing. Why would anyone assume their data is kept private on other people’s servers? Unless you are encrypting it yourself before uploading it, there is a good chance someone else is going to be able to access it.
They did not encrypt the stored data either…
Regardless of what this privacy policy says or implies, Evernote will always hold the keys to decrypt and view your notes. Whether they use them or not is what you should worry about. I’m not sure why people care that much, what kind of sensitive crap are you putting in your notes? You shouldn’t store stuff like passwords in this type of cloud system anyway. I couldn’t care less who reads my grocery list.