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.
Synonyms being used (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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!!!
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I'm confused. Are you Unroll.me's marketing director or just a happy employee?
Re:Synonyms being used (Score:5, Insightful)
Shockingly enough, people seem to be willing to pay more for data that are more or less cosmetically obfuscated, and trivial to correlate with information from other sources; and less for data that are actually anonymous enough to be impossible to reconstruct.
Re: Synonyms being used (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not difficult: The owner of an "unsubscribe" service shouldn't be selling anything except unsubscriptions.
100% of his customers are against people selling their info, by definition.
He deserves all he gets.
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What do they expect? That all the overhead is being covered by some generous benefactor? Puhlease.
People should know by now that if you get a service for free you are NOT THE CUSTOMER, you are the product. Would anyone here be surprised if
IMHO peeps should STFU with their faux outrage and focus in on cases where
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And if they paid for it and were scammed, they're saps for paying for a service that conned them, right? Because no matter what, Unroll.me isn't going to get punished for this. "Your" sympathy is worthless, and not just because you're not paying for it.
PS - Seriously, fuck you. There's no amount of money that would stop unscrupulous con arts to fuck you over for another penny if they can get away with it.
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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.
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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
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"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!
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heartbroken = "I'm affraid our customers run away and now I can't selly stock for a lot of $$$ to some investor".
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heartbroken = "I'm affraid our customers run away and now I can't selly stock for a lot of $$$ 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.
Re: Synonyms being used (Score:1)
loved it!
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All this hatred against Uber is getting mighty suspicious! What is up with that? A taxi is a just a taxi after all.
Taking an unlicensed taxi simply means getting into a car with a total stranger. Most of the drivers are probably OK, and most of them probably drive reasonably OK cars; but you don't know that. You could be unfortunate and get the serial rapist, the drunk or the guy who drives something that is falling apart, although it looks OK on the outside.
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Taking a licensed taxi simply means getting into a car with a total stranger. Most of the drivers are probably OK, and most of them probably drive reasonably OK cars; but you don't know that. You could be unfortunate and get the serial rapist, the drunk or the guy who drives something that is falling apart, although it looks OK on the outside.
There really isnt that much difference in Uber vs normal drivers.
Re: What is up? (Score:1)
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Lyft and the traditional taxi cartels are in full shill damage mode, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into negative campaigns against Uber.
I've always equated Uber and Lyft. As far as I know they both are trying to avoid having driving records and criminal background checks by governments
If you don't pay. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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).
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>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
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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
Well...duh (Score:2)
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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.
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TL;DR - ad trcking code is almost always de-coupled from the actual web page code, and give the plethora of options for IDing you (cookies, browser fingerprinting, etc
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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.
Really? (Score:1)
Re: Really? (Score:1)
Nothing is totally free (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing is totally free (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's not like paid services don't necessarily sell your data, either - after all, revenue is revenue.
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I've been explaining this to users/clients/friends/coworkers/employers for most of my IT career to no avail. For example, 'free' email services have existed for more than 2 decades, let alone 'free' search engines. It's not that people don't give a shit, it's that they do not understand the value of their metadata, while companies making BILLIONS from it obviously do.
All so they can target me with ads that I'm not going to click on.
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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.
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True, they have grown increasingly rare over time, but they do still exist. I, as well as a number of people that I know, have run them in the past and are running them now.
The time has long passed, however, that you can assume good intentions from any service. Research is the watchword of the day.
Look out behind you JoJo (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)
Just the kind of mealy-mouthed non-apology I expect from a modern CEO.
This guy is going places.
So very "heartbroken". (Score:1)
I'll bet he felt "heartbroken", too, the first time he caught himself masturbating on Christmas day.
Fuck these users (LOOK UP what unroll.me is!) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fuck these users (LOOK UP what unroll.me is!) (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between expecting something to not be private and expecting someone to take advantage of it. I'd change your 'unbelievably stupid' to 'unbelievably naive', but that's just me.
Tar, feather, run out of town on a rail (Score:3)
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Handy Link (Score:2)
https://myaccount.google.com/p... [google.com]
Let's replace him with a robot ! (Score:1)
One more jobless "CEO". And nothing of value will have been lost.
Translation (Score:2)
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I'm seriously curious - what the hell is my data worth? I went online yesterday - bought BBQ sauce. I've been buying BBQ from the same place for the past 20 years (mail order in the days before the interwebs). I've probably been buying it at the same rate for the past 20 years. What is that data worth to someone?
Thanks for that info on your buying habits. I've just sold it to Unroll.me, got quite a bit for it too.
To quote The Princess Bride... (Score:2)
He feels ... (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
"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 new (Score:2)
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.
I was heartbroken when my wife caught me (Score:1)
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I'm sure he was inconsolable the whole way to the bank.
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what kind of mouth breathing retard needs an app?
i just whistle into my microphone and pipe /dev/audio to netcat.
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History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues
I'm just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
~Elvis Costello, Beyond Belief
Silicon Valley, more entertaining than any novel