It’s a soggy, foggy cold Saturday here in San Francisco. A great time to put on a fire and read. I stumbled upon — in StumbleUpon, i suppose not so oddly — the following op ed in Wired by Andy Baio. Excellent work, Andy. Excerpted below and continuing to the original post today on Wired.
By Andy Baio
The other day, I tried out Unroll.me, a clever new service that reads your inbox to let you unsubscribe from mailing lists and other unwanted e-mail flotsam with a single click.
As I was about to connect my Gmail account, my finger hovered over the “Grant access” button.
Wait a second. Who am I giving access to my Gmail account, anyway? There was no identifying information on their site — no company address, no team page listing the names of its team members, and broken links to their privacy policy or terms of service.
For all I knew, it could be run by unscrupulous spammers or an Anonymous troll looking for lulz. And I was about to give them unfettered access to eight years of my e-mail history and, with password resets, the ability to access any of my online accounts?
I had to dig around online to find out who’s behind it, and … READ THE REST OF THIS PIECE AT WIRED. Thanks for visiting aNewDomain …
Fascinating.
