WSJ started this article, who is owned by News Corp. News Corp occasionally does anti Google and Facebook pieces. See:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/04/google-faceboo...

And: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/26/15878518/yelp-oracle-news-c...

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, but also an avid WSJ reader)

Who doesn’t occasionally do anti-Google pieces? I’d be more skeptical if they didn’t!

That said, this does smell like a hit job.

Listened to a short podcast (9 minutes) with the author of The Wall Street Journal piece, and my impression was this was done as an investigative piece to see if they could find any bad actors using the system Gmail. they weren't able to find any specific actors, but they spelled out how the system was used and potentially how it could be abused.

Podcast: https://pca.st/9jFw

Yeah, it's not clear from the article how this is much different from "Google lets app developers look at all your photos" and "Google lets apps keep track of your location". Like uh, ok, obviously. The author even admits it's "unsurprising", so what's the point of the article? It may not be a morally good practice but it's an extremely common one and hardly newsworthy. I get that there's some tie trying to be made between this and Cambridge Analytica but it seems like a huge stretch.

There isn't anything going on with the exception of ignorance on the part of the WSJ, Forbes and The Verge. You're explicitly granting a third party app access to your email. If I decide to use Outlook for iOS or Android I'm granting Microsoft permission to access my Apple email or Gmail.

I found an article on Macrumors[0] that specifically points out a company for doing so. Not sure if this Forbes article was referring to them.

[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/02/third-party-email-apps-...