Just How Desperate Are You To Save Money?

Are You Willing To Give Up Your Privacy?

A number of budget blogs as of late have been recommending Paribus—an app that reads your emails, looking for e-receipts, then checks back with the store to see if the price of whatever you bought has gone down. If it has, they get the store to give you the difference, then split it with you 75/25. Sounds pretty great, right? I mean with the exception of some bot reading your email. Their software does all the work and you get 75% of the difference back! Yeah, 75% back might be enough to salve that pesky email privacy thing.

--

I knew I'd have to give them permission to read my email. I didn't love this, but the idea of getting a little extra money back apparently outweighed my privacy issues just enough that I was willing to give it a try. Which says a lot about my priorities—money please! But I'm guessing I'm not the only one who felt okay with that trade off, given Paribus' popularity.

Heres' the thing though, when I actually went to sign up, they wanted a little more than to just read my emails. They wanted to read, send, delete, and manage my emails. That last part being rather vague—What? Are you going to organize and file my emails? Maybe save a backup copy of my correspondence... then, what's this? delete my emails? what's that about exactly?

I red through their terms of service and privacy policy and that didn't make anything clearer.

Essentially, they get to read your email, collect both identifying and "de-identifying" information on you, then share it with third parties. They also gain access to all of your shopping passwords and accounts. And it's your responsibility to secure your Paribus account (although I'm not sure how you'd do that other than a killer password).

If Equifax can't protect my data, do I really expect that an upstart app can?

Thanks, but no. That's just weird and asking for all sorts of headaches. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but that is the perfect set up for hackers, governments, or corporations to collect all sorts of information. And what for? The hope of getting $50/year back?

Snap back to reality.

I read the Privacy Policy and it doesn't explain what they mean by "delete" or "manage." It does state that they use the information for research purposes—which covers a wide range of possible uses— and that they share the information with a wide number of entities (within the scope of the law, of course).

Even if I were promised affiliate income on people who signed up for this service, I don't think I could in good conscience recommend anyone use this app. Your privacy is too important.