Looks like the “Wall Street Journal” — pretty reliably anti-Google most of the time — is at it again. My inbox is flooded with messages from Google users concerned about the WSJ’s new article (being widely quoted across the Net) “exposing” the fact that third parties may have access to your Gmail.
Ooooh, scary! The horror! Well, actually not!
This one’s basically a nothingburger.
The breathless reporting on this topic is the “revelation” that if you’ve signed up with third-party apps and given them permission to access your Gmail, they — well, you know — have access to your Gmail!
C’mon boys and girls, this isn’t rocket science. If you hire a secretary to go through your mail and list the important stuff for ya’, they’re going to be reading your mail. The same goes for these third-party apps that provide various value-added Gmail services to notify you about this, that, or the other. They have to read your Gmail to do what you want them to do! If you don’t want them reading your email, don’t sign up for them and don’t give them permission to access your Google account and Gmail!
Part of the feigned outrage in this saga is the concern that in some cases actual human beings at these third-party firms may have been reading your email rather than only machines. Well golly, if they didn’t explicitly say that humans wouldn’t read them — remember that secretary? — why would one make such an assumption?
In fact, while it’s typical for the vast majority of such third-party systems to be fully automated, it wouldn’t be considered unusual for humans to read some emails for training purposes and/or to deal with exception conditions that the algorithms couldn’t handle.
Seriously, if you’re going to sign up for third-party services like these — even though Google does carefully vet them — you should familiarize yourself with their Terms of Service if you’re going to be concerned about these kinds of issues.
Personally, I don’t give any third parties access to my Gmail. This simplifies my Gmail life considerably. Google has excellent internal controls on user data, and I fully trust Google to handle my data with care. Q.E.D.
And by the way, if you’ve lost track of third-party systems to which you may have granted access to your Gmail or other aspects of your Google account, there’s a simple way to check (and revoke access as desired) at the Google link:
https://myaccount.google.com/permissions
But really, if you don’t want third parties reading your Gmail, just don’t sign up with those third parties in the first place!
Be seeing you.
–Lauren–