A new report by the WSJ yesterday highlighted how Gmail’s ambiguous permissions have left your personal emails vulnerable. Google’s emailing platform’s access settings allow third-party developers to read nearly every detail from your account including the entire message.
While Google has said it only offers trusted and relevant companies the ability to add that module in their applications, it’s safe to say your emails are not in the right hands. The only precaution you can take right now is to review all the third-party apps which have access to your inbox. Here’s how to do it.
- Unlike Google’s approach to permissions, its settings page to revoke or edit them is quite straightforward.
- For starters, head over to your “My Account” page and log in with your Gmail credentials if you haven’t already yet.
- On the landing screen, you will be able to view and review all the third-party applications who have access to any of your Google data including Gmail.
- To locate the ones with access to your Gmail inbox, all you need to do is search for “Gmail” by pressing “Ctrl + F” on a Windows PC or “Cmd + F” on a Mac.
- If any third-party app has the right to read your emails, it will have a label called “Has access to Gmail” beneath its entry.
- There is currently no way to get rid of just the Gmail access, sadly. The only option you have is to entirely cut off that service’s access by hitting the “Remove Access” button.
Hopefully, Google will soon revamp these permissions soon to specifically let the user decide what sort of information can an application read. The company has been time and again been at the center of a controversy because of its permissions architecture which unnecessarily tries to club a lot of critical settings into a single one.