

We launched our Edison Trends e-commerce research product that provides insights about shopping trends from aggregated and anonymized transaction data extracted with permission from our Edison Mail app users. Our technology is designed to ignore personal and work email, which does not help us measure market trends.Įdison further justifies the use of a research-backed business model and says that it helps them offer an ad-free email app.
#Email scraper for mac software
To keep our Edison Mail app free, and to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, our company Edison Software measures e-commerce through a technology that automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts anonymous purchase information from them. However, the company claims to use a technology that separates commercial emails from personal and works emails.

They don’t completely deny scraping information from your inbox. In fact, COO for Cleanfox’s parent company has told Motherboard that they are selling user data for companies. Sadly, scraping data from the inbox and selling it for profit is apparently a common way for these companies to generate revenue. “Their website is all like ‘No Ads’ and ‘Privacy First’,” he added (the company’s website says “Edison Trends practices privacy by design.”) They could definitely be a bit more upfront about their commercial intents,” Seb Insua, a Edison user who said they were unaware of the data selling, told Motherboard. Edison is a pretty popular productivity app on the App Store with a 4.6 rating. As expected many users are oblivious to this and are not aware that Edison is scraping their inbox and profiting from the same.Įdison’s website has one-liners that say “privacy by design” and “privacy first.” However, what is being alleged here is exactly the opposite of what Edison claims to be. Moreover, Edison clearly mentions on its website that it does “process” users’ data. Motherboards report is pretty elaborate, in the sense they have specific information on how Slice and Cleanfox are selling products based on emails to clients. Furthermore, the report has mentioned how Edison mails data is particularly useful and data helps in making a better investment. Eventually, the data would be used to generate a personalized feed trying to sell your products. The list included Edison Mail, Slice, and Cleanfox. A recent report from Motherboard claimed that email apps are selling inbox data and selling the same to generate money.
