Updated May 27, 2026.
On April 23, 2017, the New York Times published a profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Buried in it was a sentence most readers skipped: Uber was buying data from an analytics firm called Slice Intelligence, and Slice was pulling Lyft ride receipts straight out of Unroll.me users' inboxes (Isaac, NYT, April 23, 2017). Within twenty-four hours, Unroll.me's CEO had posted an apology. Within two years, the Federal Trade Commission had filed a formal complaint. In 2026, Unroll.me is owned by NielsenIQ, still scans inboxes for commercial data, and still redirects European users to a GDPR holding page. The scandal changed the disclosures. It did not change the business model.
Short answer. Unroll.me's parent company, Slice Intelligence, sold anonymized purchase receipt data scraped from users' inboxes, including Lyft ride receipts, to Uber and other corporate clients. The FTC settled with Unroll.me on December 30, 2019 for deceiving users about how their emails would be used. Today Unroll.me belongs to NielsenIQ and continues to feed a "measurement panel" with inbox purchase data. If you want a privacy-focused Unroll.me alternative, the rest of this article explains exactly what changed and what did not.
Disclosure. Leave Me Alone is our product and we recommend it at the end of this article. Every factual claim about Unroll.me, Slice, Rakuten and NielsenIQ links to a public source: the NYT, FTC.gov, TechCrunch, NielsenIQ's own press release, or Unroll.me's published support pages. Spot an error? Email us and we correct and timestamp.
What actually happened in 2017
Mike Isaac's profile of Travis Kalanick ran in the New York Times on April 23, 2017. Most of the piece was about Uber's culture. One paragraph was about its data sourcing. Uber, the article said, had bought analytics from Slice Intelligence, and that analytics product was built from anonymized e-receipts. Among the receipts: Lyft rides. Among the source of those receipts: Unroll.me users.
The pipeline was simple. To use Unroll.me, you grant the app permission to read your Gmail or Yahoo inbox. Slice Intelligence, which owned Unroll.me, used that access to scan for commercial emails: Amazon orders, airline bookings, Lyft trips. Slice anonymized the data, packaged it as a market research feed, and sold it to corporate clients. Uber was one of those clients. It used Lyft receipt data as a proxy for Lyft's ride volume and pricing.
A follow-up NYT piece on April 24, 2017 documented the user backlash and Slice's confirmation that it sold anonymized e-receipt data to clients without naming them. The same day, Unroll.me CEO Jojo Hedaya published a blog post titled "We can do better." He called the news "heartbreaking" and wrote that "the reality is most of us — myself included — don't take the time to thoroughly review" terms of service. The line was widely quoted because it conceded the core problem: users had consented in legal text to a practice they had not actually understood.
Hedaya did not announce a change to the business model. The post itself has since been taken offline, but the contents and reception are documented in contemporaneous coverage including The Intercept's report by Sam Biddle, which quoted the post in full and called the apology "weaselly."
How Unroll.me made money: the ownership chain
To understand why an unsubscribe tool was selling Lyft data to Uber, follow the corporate trail. Each acquisition is a public, dated event.
2011. Unroll.me launches as an independent startup co-founded by Jojo Hedaya and Josh Rosenwald.
August 2014. Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce conglomerate, acquires Slice, a San Mateo-based shopping app that scanned purchase emails to surface package tracking and spending summaries (confirmed in TechCrunch's reporting on Slice's subsequent Unroll.me acquisition, November 24, 2014, which opens with "Slice, the shopping and package tracking app acquired by Rakuten earlier this year"). Slice was already in the inbox-scraping business; Rakuten now had a foothold in U.S. purchase intelligence.
November 24, 2014. Slice, now under Rakuten, acquires Unroll.me (TechCrunch, November 24, 2014). The acquisition was about user pipeline: Unroll.me had millions of users who had already granted full inbox access. Those users were a near-perfect feedstock for Slice's existing receipt-data product. Slice's own press release at the time framed the deal in exactly those terms.
2017. The NYT story breaks. Slice Intelligence is named publicly as the company turning Unroll.me users' inboxes into a Uber-facing data feed.
Mid-2019. Slice Intelligence rebrands as Rakuten Intelligence.
September 14, 2021. NielsenIQ, the global consumer measurement firm spun out from Nielsen, acquires Rakuten Intelligence. NielsenIQ's announcement positions the deal as the foundation for "the largest e-commerce measurement panel in the United States." Unroll.me went along with the rest of the assets.
So in 2026 the chain is: Unroll.me → Slice / Slice Intelligence (2014) → Rakuten Intelligence (rebrand, 2019) → NielsenIQ (2021). The product did not move because anyone wanted to reform it. It moved because measurement businesses kept getting bigger, and an inbox panel with millions of opted-in users is a strategic asset for any measurement business.
What Unroll.me admits today
Unroll.me's current onboarding and support pages describe a "measurement panel." When you sign up, you become part of that panel by default. The panel authorizes Unroll.me to scan the commercial emails in your inbox (receipts, shipping confirmations, subscription renewals) and to share anonymized purchase data with NielsenIQ's clients.
According to Unroll.me's opt-out support article, you can disable panel membership in Settings by deselecting "Measurement Panel Opt-In." The unsubscribe and rollup features continue to function whether or not the panel toggle is on.
Unroll.me's your-data page states that personal identifiers are stripped before any purchase data reaches NielsenIQ's clients, and that data is sold as aggregated panels rather than individual records. That framing matches the language Slice used in 2017. The FTC's 2019 complaint did not dispute whether the data was anonymized. It addressed whether Unroll.me users had ever been clearly told their inboxes would be scanned for commercial intelligence in the first place.
Does Unroll.me still sell data in 2026?
Yes, structurally. With cleaner disclosure than in 2017.
The model is unchanged at the core. Sign up for Unroll.me, grant inbox access, and your commercial emails are scanned, parsed for purchase signals, anonymized, and contributed to NielsenIQ's measurement products. NielsenIQ sells those products to retailers, consumer goods companies, and e-commerce firms that want to track competitive trends.
What the FTC settlement changed:
- Disclosure is more prominent. Unroll.me references the measurement panel during onboarding rather than only in terms of service.
- An explicit opt-out exists. Users can deselect panel membership in Settings.
- Past receipts were deleted. The FTC order required Unroll.me to delete e-receipts already collected from users who had not been adequately informed, unless it obtained renewed express consent.
What did not change: the company's revenue still depends on inbox data. The unsubscribe feature is the user-facing product. The measurement panel is the business.
For the legal record of what the FTC found and ordered, see the FTC settlement that followed.
What this means for users: an honest assessment
Two distinct concerns get tangled up in coverage of the Unroll.me story. They are worth separating.
Concern 1: Is your personal identity being sold to corporate clients? There is no published evidence that named user identities reached Uber or any other client. The FTC complaint focused on deception in disclosure, not on identity theft. Slice and NielsenIQ have consistently described the panel as anonymized and aggregated.
Concern 2: Is the content of your inbox being read and monetized? Yes, and this is the part that matters practically. Unroll.me's servers parse every commercial email in your inbox. Receipts, orders, subscription renewals, ride confirmations. The content of those emails (what you buy, from whom, when, for how much) is the raw input that becomes the panel data sold to NielsenIQ's clients. The fact that your name is stripped before the data leaves does not change the fact that your purchase behavior is the product.
Whether that trade is acceptable is a personal decision. What was not acceptable, in the FTC's view, was making that decision without knowing about it. That was the conduct the 2019 order addressed.
Frequently asked questions
Did Unroll.me sell my emails?
Not as wholesale inbox dumps. Unroll.me's parent company, Slice Intelligence, extracted commercial e-receipts from users' inboxes, anonymized them, and sold aggregated purchase data to corporate clients including Uber. The content of those receipts (purchase amounts, vendors, timestamps) was monetized. Names and other identifiers were stripped before the data left Slice.
Is Unroll.me still owned by Rakuten?
No. NielsenIQ completed its acquisition of Rakuten Intelligence on September 14, 2021. The full chain: Unroll.me was acquired by Slice in November 2014, Slice was acquired by Rakuten in August 2014, Slice was renamed Rakuten Intelligence in 2019, and NielsenIQ bought the whole entity in 2021.
Did anyone face criminal charges?
No. The FTC complaint was a civil regulatory action, not a criminal prosecution. The Commission finalized the settlement in December 2019, and Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips published a separate statement explaining his concurring view. No fines were assessed and no individuals were charged. The order imposed a 20-year monitoring period and required Unroll.me to notify users about its data practices.
Should I delete my Unroll.me account?
It depends on whether you are comfortable with the measurement panel model. If you are, Unroll.me works as advertised for unsubscribing. If you are not, you have two options: leave the panel by toggling off "Measurement Panel Opt-In" in Settings while continuing to use the unsubscribe feature, or switch to a tool that does not run a panel at all. Leave Me Alone is built on the second model: paid product, real unsubscribes, no measurement panel, no commercial data resold.
What did the Unroll.me CEO say at the time?
CEO Jojo Hedaya published a post titled "We can do better" on April 24, 2017. He called the coverage "heartbreaking" and acknowledged that most users do not read terms of service. He did not announce a change to the business model. The original post was later removed; The Intercept quoted it in full the same day it was published, which is now the most accessible public record.
Was Lyft a victim or a customer?
Lyft was the subject of the data sale, not a party to it. Uber bought anonymized Lyft receipt data from Slice; Lyft was not informed. After the NYT story, Lyft publicly criticized the practice.
Limits of this article
This article covers the data-selling story specifically: what was extracted, sold to whom, through which corporate structure, and what the model looks like in 2026. It does not cover:
- The full legal terms of the FTC complaint, the consent order, and the commissioners' statements. Those are in the FTC settlement that followed.
- Why Unroll.me does not operate in the European Union. That involves GDPR, not the U.S. scandal, and is a separate piece.
- A feature comparison of the inbox tools available to former Unroll.me users. See what to switch to for that.
If any claim above is wrong, email us with a source and we will correct the article with a dated note.
Bottom line
Unroll.me built a free unsubscribe tool and paid for it by selling what was inside the inbox. The 2017 NYT story made the practice public. The 2019 FTC settlement forced clearer disclosure and the deletion of older data. The 2021 NielsenIQ acquisition folded the asset into a bigger measurement business.
In 2026, the disclosures are better and the opt-out exists. The data pipeline is the same.
If you want real unsubscribes without an inbox panel attached, Leave Me Alone is a privacy-focused Unroll.me alternative built on a different deal: you pay a small fee, we process the unsubscribes, your inbox is not scanned for commercial data, and there is no measurement panel.
