Email unsubscribe service Unroll.me sold user data to Uber

Unroll.me, a service that helps users get rid of unwanted email subscriptions, has sold user data to Uber through parent company Slice Intelligence. The taxi company used this data from the e-mail service to keep a better view of its competitor Lyft.

Slice used Unroll.me’s data to understand how Lyft’s customers were using the service. To this end, the payment statements sent to Lyft customers via email were collected. This data would have been sold to Uber anonymously. Uber allegedly used this information to determine how well Lyft was doing as a business. Slice has confirmed that it sold anonymized user data extracted from statements from both Uber and Lyft, but the company declined to say to whom. That writes The New York Times.

Unroll.me CEO Jojo Hedaya commented on the revelation in a blog post, saying it was “heartbreaking” to see some users upset when they found out that Unroll.me was using the free service to make money. . In the blog post, he makes no apologies for selling user data, pointing out that the company values ​​the privacy of its users and never distributes personal data. He refers to the terms of use and privacy policy, which, according to Hedaya, would show that selling anonymized user data is part of Unroll.me’s business model.

Unroll.me is a free service founded in 2011 that allows users to get rid of email newsletters and mailing list signups. Users have to give Unroll.me access to their inboxes, after which the contents of emails are scanned to find out who is the sender of the unwanted emails. Users can then delete individual email subscriptions with a simple click of the mouse.

The New York Times publication also revealed that Apple CEO Tim Cook has threatened to remove Uber’s app from the App Store for breaking the store’s tracking rules. Uber reportedly applies geofencing to Apple’s headquarters to avoid detection.