Justen Robertson

Thanks for hearing us and responding quickly. We're still in an awkward position here: the fact that you made this decision in the first place, even though you reversed it, calls into question how you're making decisions regarding privacy and whether you've really thought through the implications of a change like this. I urge you to hire an expert in these matters, or loop in someone from your team who is already familiar with them if you haven't already. I know we privacy and security nuts can be a pain in the rear, but we have good reasons for it! It may be true that the vast majority of your users and their notes don't present serious privacy concerns, but for the remainder of us a single leak, misuse of data, or oversight on the part of your staff could lead to a cascade of much more serious issues that extend far beyond the scope of Evernote itself. We have to put our trust in somebody and we've chosen you. Please take that more seriously in the future. @allen the other items in the privacy policy are fairly industry standard compromises, and ones that everyone should be aware of. They're necessary for legal and technical reasons, and I can accept that and take it into consideration when deciding whether to store sensitive data in Evernote. There's a big difference between those and "we might peek in on your notes at random to see whether our ML bots are doing what we think they should".

This change to your policy is absolutely unacceptable. I've trusted Evernote for years with very sensitive information thanks to its support for 2-factor authentication and HTTPS over the web app - hundreds of notes that contain private and proprietary information about clients and their data. I've relied on Evernote to uphold that trust. It has been the best option for keeping these notes on hand regardless of where I am or what device I'm using, and this policy completely undermines that. I don't care how well-credentialed and background-checked your list of authorized employees are; the fact is you're asking me to trust unknown persons to have random access to this information, or to trust in algorithms I know nothing about to be able to identify what they should and should not see, in order to test what amounts to a toy. It's my job to decide who should and should not have access to this information, not yours. The only situations where anyone should be granted access to my data are with my specific prior approval or under legal obligation. If you can't test your machine learning algorithms in a developer sandbox using test data that hasn't been filched from unauthorized private sources, you are not ready to be playing with these tools. For once I'm thankful the tech media started a panic, or I wouldn't have known to opt out - and I'm still wary of the other reasons you might choose to access my notes without authorization. It's a shame I even have to, since I'd like to see what you do with machine learning, but I don't see any way to opt out of snooping while opting in to the features you claim to need it in order to support. Worse yet, as a Linux and Android user exclusively, I can't even use your built-in encryption tools to protect sensitive notes on a per-item basis since you haven't bothered to support it on my platforms. This is the worst in a series of unilateral decisions over the past year or so that have undermined my faith in your credibility and wisdom in moving Evernote forward. I understand you're under a lot of financial pressure but I can't understand how you thought doing this, especially in order to support a feature of dubious value, was supposed to help. I've come to the point where instead of considering upgrading my account in order to support you financially (despite not needing any of the things on offer in your paid tiers), I'm actively looking for a replacement for Evernote and no longer recommending it to friends and clients. What a shame.