Evernote Privacy Change

Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving. ... The app allows users to create a "note" which can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments.

Evernote company has ignited a firestorm among its users when it announced a privacy policy change that would have required users to open up all their notes for analysis in order to take advantage of forthcoming machine learning features. Due to a tough market competing against Microsoft, Google, Apple, and a host of other companies to be the service for people to store their notes, this reversal is an important move for Evernote.

In order to train that type of machine learning system, Evernote may ask its users to submit notes they’re comfortable sharing with the company as part of a beta program. In addition, users will be able to choose to submit their notes for review if a system didn’t identify them correctly.


If that was the intention all along, why did Evernote change its privacy policy?