To keep our Edison Mail app free, and to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, our company Edison Software, measures e-commerce through a technology that automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts anonymous purchase information from them. Our technology is designed to ignore personal and work email, which does not help us measure market trends.
Hahahahahahaha! MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Yeah, right. Okay. I'd like to hear how that "technology" works. If it whitelists what's sniffed based on known marketing email addresses, okay, sure. If my locally running app is sniffing all my emails for marketing-speak (receipts, whatever), I'm suspicious.
And 9to5 does a good job saying why this is wack. I mean, Google is doing this like mad in Gmail, and probably not nearly as safely as Edison. But Gmail also doesn't do this... (again from 9to5)
And when looking at the big picture, Edison having phrases like “privacy by design” and “privacy first” on its website can feel misleading after learning about how they scrape and sell personal data.
Sell your email client. Charge a subscription. But don't turn on email sniffing by default without telling every customer before they add an account.
That's evil.