Just two days after introducing a privacy update that would allow Evernote employees to look at some of the notes posted by anyone using the service, the productivity platform has reversed the decision.
After a public outcry, Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill released a statement to apologize for the decision and promised to fix the problem posed by the changes to the company’s privacy policy.
“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.
The changes would have allowed some of its employees to “to exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content,” and the company added that the number of employees with this liberty would be small.
Customers would have the opportunity to opt out of this machine learning function, though they couldn’t opt out of Evernote employees reading their notes for other reasons stated in their privacy policy, such as looking into possible violations of the company’s terms of service.
Evernote recently released the following statement.
“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.”
[source]Android Authority[/source]
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