it looked as if they (porovider) might have been reading the emails.

The IT manager exploded and confronted them. The response was chilling:

"I’m not saying we do - but we could. It’s in the contract. You should read the fine print, especially the unilateral amendment from two years ago.".

"Unilateral agreement" here means that they send you a message saying "We've updated our TOS" and if you don't reply otherwise, you agreed.

Horror story.

BTW:

All of this happened before the GDPR era, when certain practices could still slip through.