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Unroll.me 'Heartbroken' After Being Caught Selling User Data To Uber (cnet.com)
The chief executive of email unsubscription service Unroll.me has said he is "heartbroken" that users felt betrayed by the fact that his company monetises the contents of their inbox by selling their data to companies such as Uber. Over the weekend, The New York Times published a profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, in which, among other things, it reported that following an acquisition by shopping app Slice in 2014, Unroll.me developed a side-business: selling aggregated data about users to the very apps they were unsubscribing from. Uber was one of Slice's big data arm Slice Intelligence's customers. CNET adds: While Unroll.me did not specifically admit to selling data to Uber, it has apologised for not being "explicit enough" in explaining how its free service worked. "It was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service," CEO Jojo Hedaya said on the Unroll.me blog. While reiterating that "all data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only," Hedaya admitted, "we need to do better for our users" by offering clearer information on its website.
Let me extrapolate a little to make the CEO-talk clearer.
heartbroken = "I'm heartbroken I got caught"
monetises = scams / profiteers
side-business = shady shit we don't want our front-business associated with.
aggregated data = Doesn't include your name explicitly.
unsubscribing = Acquiring a profiteering middle-man to skim some of that money off the top.
explicit enough = details hidden in the fine print, page 233 of the TOS.
free service = not free, we are doing exactly what you used our service to prevent.
It was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service = You weren't supposed to find out.
we need to do better for our users = we're gonna keep doing what we're doing.
Hope this helps.
You are the product. Well, then too they sell your data. So you are shit out of luck no matter what.
And it's not like paid services don't necessarily sell your data, either - after all, revenue is revenue.
Just the kind of mealy-mouthed non-apology I expect from a modern CEO.
This guy is going places.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
It sounds shady and treacherous, until you ask "WTF is unroll.me?" so I clicked through to RTFA..
OMFG. These users are giving someone else access to their email accounts?
This isn't shady. 100.0% of the users know for sure, without any question or speculation, that their emails are not being kept private. They opted into lack of privacy. That the contents of their emails are sold to others for profit, isn't a surprise to any of these people.
If you find a person who says they are surprised, then there are only two possibilities:
1) That person is lying. Don't listen to that person anymore, because they're a liar. And I don't care what happens to them. Hopefully their lying ends up costing them some kind of devastatingly painful lesson.
2) That person is over-the-top unbelievably stupid. (So unbelievably, that I really think the above "lying" explanation is far more likely.) But if they insist they're this this-magnitude of stupid, let it go. But then stop listening to them, because stupid people have just as little useful-to-say as liars.
Seriously: Fuck These Users. They knowingly signed up to get fucked; it's ok that it happened. They didn't want privacy. These users are basically the same kind of people as use gmail. Not a single one of them expects their emails to be private.