VICE media has obtained a J.P. Morgan document revealing that some popular apps including Edison Mail scrape users’ email inboxes
“and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions”
Edison Mail does disclose this on their website but not prominently. The J.P. Morgan document says that Edison Mail provides them with “consumer purchase metrics including brand loyalty, wallet share, purchase preferences, etc.”
As always Ausdroid reminds readers that if you’re not paying for a product or service online, in most cases your data will be used to make revenue for the company creating that product/service.
Other free email productivity apps such as Cleanfox by Foxintelligence also sell data about their users emails to companies. You can of course opt-out of data sharing or delete your stored data with Edison Mail.
If you’re worried about free email apps mining your data it might be better to stick to Gmail, Microsoft Outlook for Android etc.
