Author: Dave Fitch

I signed up for Unroll.me when it launched – anything that helped me to manage the pile of unread email had to be good, right? The idea seemed good and the instructions seemed reasonably clear, so I installed it, gave it access to my gmail account, and…

Well, I forgot about it. I didn’t use it much – once you stop using it you forget how the app works [drag the email to the left to do something, drag it up to do something else, drag it to the right to do a third thing…] it stops having much value, and checking the FAQ didn’t remind me what the different swipes meant, and I wasn’t going to swipe away and then check my gmail to see what actually happened. Eventually the app got updated to show what the different drags did, but I’d lost interest in it by that point.

Then it turned out that what Unroll.me actually was, was a snooper – you’d given it access to your email, and Unroll.me was selling information about the services you used and the mails you read/unsubscribed from. The CEO of Unrollme may be ‘heartbroken’ this has become public, but I doubt it. If you check the FAQ it doesn’t say anything about how your data is used (or misused).

If you have installed Unroll.me you have to do two things: 1] delete the app, 2] go to your email settings and *revoke Unrollme’s access to your email accounts*. Deleting the app won’t stop Unroll.me from reading your email: you have to revoke access yourself.