Evernote’s New Privacy Policy Lets Employees Read Your Notes

Evernote is a great place to store your notes, photos, and memos as it syncs in the cloud and basically applies it across multiple devices at the same time that has Evernote installed. So far the app has quite a few fans, but unfortunately the introduction of a new privacy policy has riled many users up.

In the new privacy policy, Evernote is basically telling its users that the company’s employees have the right to once in awhile go through your notes. “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.”

Evernote says that this is about ensuring their machine learning tech works correctly, but because sometimes things happen, human intervention is sometimes needed. “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.”

The good news is that this policy has yet to go into effect as it is slated for the 23rd of January, 2017. This means that users can either choose to keep using the service knowing that there might be a time where Evernote employees may require access to their notes, or leave completely and bring their data with them.

There is an option to out of this machine learning feature, but as Evernote points out, “And please note that you cannot opt out of employees looking at your content for other reasons stated in our Privacy Policy”, which basically  changes nothing. This isn’t the first time that a company’s privacy policy has made its users mad, and unfortunately we don’t think this will be the last either.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Apps, evernote, Privacy