Alphabet Inc.'s Google revealed on a statement made on Thursday that the company would still allow third-party apps to scan through the accounts made on its proprietary emailing service, Gmail, in search for data and information sharing. The tech firm did reason out that these automated scans were being done based on a set of provisions.
Google is currently in the crosshairs of the US Senate, as the legislative body seeks out developers suspected to have breached its email-scanning policies, a report from Reuters said.
The manner in which user information is being handled in internet platforms like Google and Facebook, just to mention a few, has been the subject of scrutiny by the public and several governing bodies in the US and even abroad. It was previously revealed that firms such as the Mark Zuckerberg-founded website practiced lax monitoring on this issue.
In a letter addressed to the US Senators, Google divulged the fact that it still relies on automated scans and reports coming from security researchers.
Gmail users, in particular, should first give their consent before these app extensions get activated. Moreover, the Google policy states that these third-party research firms must notify the company of its method of data collecting and sharing, a report from Daily Mail UK added.
It turns out, however, that there were involved parties believed to have violated such policies. Google, on its part, failed to clarify to the lawmakers how many have breached the given provisions.
A separate report from Reuters said that Google should soon be able to provide concrete figures as the Senate is slated to meet them, along with representatives from Apple Inc., AT&T Inc., and Twitter Inc. in an upcoming Commerce Committee hearing this Sept. 26. The forum will discuss privacy practices done by tech platforms such as those named above.
Inciting Incident
The Senate inquiry on the supposed data breach came after a report from the Wall Street Journal surfaced in July indicating some irregularities between the policy and its intended execution.
As pointed out by the news agency, various external apps failed to divulge to the platform users that their employees have access to these scanned data. In the case of Gmail, Google staff can review email messages which in turn put the information at risk. An example of how this works is when a trip-planning app scans a Gmail user's email for any upcoming flight plans. The data incurred will then be used to inquire for departure information on a specific airline.
