• by Ray Schultz , May 7, 2018

Unrolll.me, the free email unsubscribe, will stop serving European users two days before the General Data Protection Regulation is scheduled to take effect.

The company, which was embroiled in a privacy scandal last year when it was revealed that parent Slice Intelligence had sold anonymized data of Lyft users to rival Uber, states, “Unfortunately, we can no longer support users from the EU as of the 23rd of May.” It adds that it will delete EU user accounts by May 24. 

According to reports, the company could change this policy in the future. But for now, it apparently has decided that it cannot comply with GDPR, which takes effect on May 25. 

The firm made this statement last week:

“The EU is implementing new data privacy rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“Unfortunately, our service is intended to serve users in the U.S. Because it was not designed to comply with all GDPR requirements, Unroll.Me will not be available to EU residents. This means we may not serve users we believe are residents of the EU, and we must delete any EU user accounts by May 24. We are truly sorry that we are unable to offer our service to you.

Unroll.me provides users with a daily “rollup” of their subscriptions that it claims helps keep their inboxes organized, while allowing them to unsubscribe from emails they don’t want.  

The service states on its site that it “shares information from your commercial and transactional emails with Slice. Slice’s technology automatically extracts purchase information from these emails and uses that information to build anonymized market research products for its clients. Slice’s market research products do not include your personal information.”

Last year, following a New York Times report on Unroll.me’s data practices and the sale of Lyft data to Uber, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit, alleging that it had violated the federal wiretap law. The suit claimed that the privacy disclosures are “obfuscated,” and that anonymized data can be identified.

At that time, Unroll.me’s chief executive Jojo Hedaya called it “heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.”