Evernote has recently announced a proposed change to its privacy policy that will let some of its staff to look at app’s user notes. The policy change was supposed to start being implemented by January. But after receiving overwhelmingly negative feedbacks, the company backtracked and issued its cancellation.
Users of the Evernote were mostly concerned about their privacy being taken away from them. The company previously said that the new policy would “improve its machine learning technology”. Though that might be the case, Evernote is certainly going overboard.
According to the PC World, Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill said in an interview, “We let our users down. We tactically communicated in about as poor a way as we could. If any human is going to be involved, it’s going to be on an opt-in basis, period.” O’Neill assured that Evernote “never has and won’t read people’s notes without their permission”. He added that they are going to take “immediate action to fix it”, according to a report by TechCrunch.
Since the note-taking app will not continue on the controversial privacy policy, users should not worry about their data being shared with Evernote’s employees. CSO Online reported that the users only had until Jan. 23 to move their notes out of the company’s system. They were also warned to delete their accounts if they did not want Evernote’s employees to read their notes. The company wanted to work on algorithms by letting their staff “view private information”.
Unfortunately, it was at the expense of their users’ privacy and control over their accounts. Evernote explained their decision to let a number of their employees to review notes. In a statement, the company said, “While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should.”
It should be noted that Evernote was actually the leader among note-taking apps. However, some of its users had switched to other apps. This might be a better time to do so. One of its rivals is Microsoft’s OneNote. According to the Windows Central, there is actually a simple tool that you can download to transfer your notes from Evernote. You are only required to at least have a device running on Windows 7 and later operating system versions. The OneNote app is pretty much available in more platforms for free. It can be used on Windows 10 Mobile, iOS and Android devices, PCs, tablets and the web.
