Evernote Decides Not to Let Employees Read Users’ Notes ⇥ blog.evernote.com

Greg Chiemingo of Evernote responds to an outrageous privacy policy update that would allow their employees to peruse users’ notes unless they opted out (emphasis his):

After receiving a lot of customer feedback expressing concerns about our upcoming Privacy Policy changes over the past few days, Evernote is reaffirming its commitment to keep privacy at the center of what we do. As a result, we will not implement the previously announced Privacy Policy changes that were scheduled to go into effect January 23, 2017.

Instead, in the coming months we will be revising our existing Privacy Policy to address our customers’ concerns, reinforce that their data remains private by default, and confirm the trust they have placed in Evernote is well founded. In addition, we will make machine learning technologies available to our users, but no employees will be reading note content as part of this process unless users opt in. We will invite Evernote customers to help us build a better product by joining the program.

I don’t know why Evernote thought they’d get away with the proposed change. Perhaps they think none of their users would bother to read the privacy policy.

Still, if you haven’t switched away from Evernote, now isn’t a bad time to do so. Depending on what features you use, consider Bear — Apple’s pick for App of the Year — or the always-reliable Notational Velocity. I primarily use the latter, with nvAlt on the Mac and nvNotes on my iPhone. Unfortunately, I’ve synced them via Dropbox; I’d like to switch to a more encrypted sync system — iCloud, for instance — but it doesn’t appear to be supported yet in nvNotes.