Mail for gmail app multiple accounts install#
Mail for gmail app multiple accounts full#

But if we don’t pick and choose the apps we install based, at least in part, on the data they collect from us, then we send the message that it’s open-house on our information, that anything goes. They can infer all the data on their backend service.”Ĭlearly true. Google has gigantic computing capabilities. Tommy Mysk, one of the researchers who caught TikTok snooping on iOS clipboards and Facebook downloading user links, explains that “while the Gmail app might be able to collect more info than Gmail in a web browser, the majority of the issues highlighted by the privacy labels still apply anywhere you use Gmail. And while the privacy labels are just an indicator of the most harvesting an app can do-they don’t tell us exactly what’s being taken and for what purpose, it tells us what we need to know. There are also data fields your phone provides that Google may not have been given access to-your location, your contacts, your search history, for example. Gmail can gather most of the information on its privacy label from your use of the platform itself, whichever app or browser or client you use, and remember the difference between actual content “in apps” and the metadata around that.

Mail for gmail app multiple accounts full#

Google also pointed me to comments made by CEO Sundar Pichai: “We don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content-such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos-for advertising purposes, period.” Full details on its data privacy policies, Google said, can be found within its online help centre. In response to this story, Google told me that the data it collects is used to “provide helpful and personalized experiences in Google products, including faster searching and automatic recommendations,” and that users “can control what activity gets saved to their account or delete their activity at any time.” The company also pointed out that “Google will no longer use the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) or other information in scope of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy on iOS for personalized advertisements and ad-related measurement in the near future.” “Contrasting the apps makes it pretty obvious what the differences are.”Īpple Mail Vs Microsoft Outlook Vs Google Gmail Apple Privacy Labels

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” security researcher Sean Wright points out. Gmail is also the only one of these three leading iOS email apps that says in its privacy label that it uses your identifier and location data for third-party advertising. Not only are Gmail’s labels much longer, but it captures your identifiers in every category. The contrast with Apple Mail is stark, and so the comparison with Outlook may be more potent. Gmail’s privacy label is not pretty-you can see it below. And when it comes to platforms like Gmail, which is linked to your Google account and the other services you consume, there are multiple ways to collect your data and monitor your activity. Google is a data harvesting machine in the same way as Facebook. We can now see each data category and field in which Gmail can tap into your data, collecting it and processing it for its own use and subject, of course, to its own privacy policy. Google’s email app, the most popular productivity install on Apple’s App Store, finally has a privacy label. Google / Apple App StoreĪnd so, to Gmail. Gmail tops iOS 'productivity' installs, but was not updated for months. Google’s delayed and now gradual approach has triggered a much more muted response. WhatsApp’s woes, in particular, become something of a viral storm. Countless articles appeared on the release of Facebook’s (alarming) privacy labels. There has certainly been no first mover advantage here. Not only did Facebook’s various missteps plot something of a path, but they also took the sting out of the media response-privacy labels were news for a while, and then that inevitably faded.

The global media storm awaiting the results of Apple’s privacy label launch was just such a minefield, and Google was able to watch (and learn) as Facebook went first. If you need to cross a minefield, then better someone else goes first. Some have suggested that Google might have been carrying out work behind the scenes to tone down its data harvesting. As alarming as browser tracking might be, when an app on your phone can tap into all of the information it carries, and then use that to algorithmically determine how best to manipulate you into buying goods and services, that’s worse. These privacy labels have become a game-changer in a world where smartphone users and their information has become a product fueling the staggeringly sized mobile marketing industry.