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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Unroll.me 'Heartbroken' After Being Caught Selling User Data To Uber (cnet.com) 109

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.
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Unroll.me 'Heartbroken' After Being Caught Selling User Data To Uber

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  • by TimothyHollins ( 4720957 ) on Monday April 24, 2017 @09:09AM (#54291575)

    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.

    • Oh quit being so dramatic. They sold statistics. This is the same thing as when the BLS publishes the CES showing that American households in the median income quintile direct 12.1% of their spending to food oh my god you're in that quintile and your data is being published!!!

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I'm confused. Are you Unroll.me's marketing director or just a happy employee?

      • From at least some reports I've read, they didn't [just?] sell statistics, also things like lyft email receipts that were 'anonymized'.

        from https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html:

        Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber.

        • That sentence doesn't say it sold receipts; it says it sold "anonymized data". They could be collecting Lyft receipts, reading the locales, aggregating statistics (which produces data that doesn't have any idenitfying information), and selling Uber statistics on age demographics, lengths of trips, where trips started and ended, times of day, etc.

          If you get a block of data that tells you that 20-25-year-old males in Boston are traveling from one block area to another block area, average trip lengths of 4

      • "Oh quit being so dramatic. They sold statistics. "

        You're forgetting the Slashdotista rules: to you mass information about when people visit the Walmart on Wednesdays is just anonymous data. But if the data is being sold to Uber, it's EEEVIL because UNITED MYLAN MONSANTO COMCAST AARGH!

    • by johanw ( 1001493 )

      heartbroken = "I'm affraid our customers run away and now I can't selly stock for a lot of $$$ to some investor".

      • heartbroken = "I'm affraid our customers run away and now I can't selly stock for a lot of $$$ to some investor".

        ...$$$ to some stupid investors who'll lose what was spent buying my stupid idea. I can then spend 10% of that $$$ on my next investment scam.

        Fixed that for you.

  • If you don't pay. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Monday April 24, 2017 @09:17AM (#54291605)
    You are the product. Well, then too they sell your data. So you are shit out of luck no matter what.
    • by Nutria ( 679911 )

      Exactly. Because hardware (whether direct purchase or rented AWS time) doesn't grow on trees that people can just go out and pick during the fall harvest, and neither do programmers (who like high salaries).

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Its possible they could derive some aggregate data, e.g. 50% of people subscribed to list X are subscribed to Y list. Or alternatively convince marketers to pay them for helping clean up their leads.
      • >Or alternatively convince marketers to pay them for helping clean up their leads.

        Marketers LOVE people who want to unsubscribe - because while a lot of us just want to be left the hell alone, many of them are people who are fairly weak-willed and suggestible, and unsubscribing is an attempt to remove temptation.

        They are, in fact, a spammer's target demographic.

        The only time I hit 'unsubscribe' is when it's a specific, moderately trustworthy company where I know how the emails started coming. I mean, th

        • ...and unsubscribing is an attempt to remove temptation.

          This is exactly correct. 40+ years ago I was selling encyclopedias, door-to-door, in western Canada (the BC interior, Alberta "ditto", and the Northwest Territories). I quickly learned the futility of knocking on 100+ doors in an evening, and would cruise the neighborhood, or town, looking for a number of "tells," one of which (my fave) was that little "No peddlers, solicitors, or agents" sticker/sign. Several people I was training one evening were sur

  • Come on. We've seen enough of this, see the Trump deregulation of broadband providers to see people's data. We have to assume that anyone having our data is selling it unless there is a written statement indicating no data will be given to 3rd parities without the customer explicit consent. There are VPN companies who will put in writing "no traffic logs kept". Hopefully such companies honor those words. Free services have to be used with extreme caution. The irony is you can get you own email for as little
    • by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      VPN's suck for several reasons.

      Don't get me wrong, I use them for very specific purposes, but...

      Many sites do not work correctly, even on paid vpns. From languages changing to broken javascript, to slowness it makes for an aggravating user experience for an average user.

      If you use your regular browser and log into sites, or even once launch your regular browser and surf, all the ad-trackers from google, facebook et all will just learn that you are on such and such VPN IP instead of such and such ISP IP.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      There was not Trump deregulation because there was never a rule in place, they are removing some proposed rules that were put up at the last moment and without much discussion and never implemented.
      Get over your hatred, if you were not worried about your data being sold six months ago then you have no need to worry now, since nothing has changed.
  • There is a company called "unroll.me" and there actually is a CEO of this "service"?
    • Yes, there are such things as stupid questions. If the answer is, "yes, that's just what it fucking said", you've asked a stupid question.
  • by hoffmanjon ( 845536 ) on Monday April 24, 2017 @09:31AM (#54291695)
    People need to understand that all of these "Free" services on the web aren't really free. Either they make money by displaying advertisements or they make money by selling data or they do both. What ever way they go, they need to monetize the service to pay the employees to continue providing the service.
    • by Escogido ( 884359 ) on Monday April 24, 2017 @09:41AM (#54291739)

      And it's not like paid services don't necessarily sell your data, either - after all, revenue is revenue.

      • by Luthair ( 847766 )
        For example - US Internet Service Providers. Both gouge you on pricing and sell you out.
    • This is generally true, but there do, in fact, exist services that are entirely free and are even devoid of advertising. You shouldn't assume that "nothing is free", but you should pay attention to terms of service just in case.

  • Awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)

    Just the kind of mealy-mouthed non-apology I expect from a modern CEO.

    This guy is going places.

  • I'll bet he felt "heartbroken", too, the first time he caught himself masturbating on Christmas day.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, 2017 @10:31AM (#54291959)

    It sounds shady and treacherous, until you ask "WTF is unroll.me?" so I clicked through to RTFA..

    Unroll.me promises to organise your inbox by sorting subscription emails and letting you unsubscribe from the ones you don't want.

    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.

  • Optional: Drawing and quartering. That's the fate that should await any company that lies to and sells out it's users like that. Hanging is too good for them. A firing squad is too good for them. Boiling them in oil is too good for them. The WOODCHIPPER is too good for them. Head-on-a-pike in the public square, as a warning to everyone else: STOP VIOLATING OUR PRIVACY ONLINE, YOU BASTARDS!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    One more jobless "CEO". And nothing of value will have been lost.

  • Heart: broken. Wallet: just fine, thanks.
  • "You keep using that word. I do no think it means what you think it means."
  • 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.

    Heartbroken because user "felt betrayed" or actually were betrayed?

    • by Megane ( 129182 )

      "It was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service,"

      Heartbroken because the users found out about it.

  • Nothing is free, if you are not paying, you are the product. This has been going on for a long time now (Facebook, Google etc.) Anyone who is surprised at this point has not been paying attention.

  • fucking the babysitter. I couldn't believe she was mad at me! My penis was completely anonymized with a condom most of the time.

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