Unroll.me discloses its freewheeling use of personal data in its privacy policy, which says<br />that “we may collect, use, transfer, sell and disclose nonpersonal information for any purpose” and that the data can be used “to build anonymous market research products and services.”<br />Yet few people read such policies closely, privacy advocates said.<br />Unroll.me, a free service to unsubscribe from email lists, can scour people’s inboxes for receipts from services like Lyft<br />and then sell the information to companies like Uber.<br />As long as a service like Unroll.me has a privacy policy, adheres to it<br />and does not sell personally identifiable information, like someone’s name, it is fairly free to package and sell the data it collects.<br />Slice Intelligence, a data firm that uses an email management program called Unroll.me to scan people’s inboxes for information, faced an outcry<br />that began on Sunday after reported that Uber had used Slice’s data to keep tabs on its ride-hailing rival Lyft.<br />Both Uber and Lyft pay for information from Slice as well as other data services, according to two people familiar with<br />the companies’ competitive intelligence programs, who asked to remain anonymous because the programs were confidential.<br />Katharina Kopp, director of policy at the Center for Digital Democracy, said of Unroll.me, “Under the disguise of being customer friendly<br />and helping their customers to get rid of ‘email junk,’ they allow the profiling and targeting of their unwitting customers by third parties.”<br />Ms. Kopp called the Unroll.me tactic a “particularly misleading practice,” despite the disclosure in its privacy policy.
