6 ms·

Hi there, I’m Dave and I work at AngelList on our Talent platform. Please accept our sincere apologies for what happened here. Sending an email without giving

by dzohrob 11y ago

Hi there, I’m Dave and I work at AngelList on our Talent platform. Please accept our sincere apologies for what happened here. Sending an email without giving you a heads-up or control over its content was wrong. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it: * We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. * We’ve revised the project tagging email to clarify that it’s automatically generated by AngelList. * We’re looking through all emails we send on behalf of our users to make sure that a) it’s clear when an action may generate an email notification, and b) any automatically generated notifications come directly from AngelList. As long as you keep your profile up-to-date by tagging your current and previous employers, we won't show them you’re looking for a job— they won’t see your name or resume appear when using our recruiting tools. Again, please accept our apologies. We’re working to make this better. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns -- dave@angel.co. Thanks, dave

DiNovi 11y ago
Of course, updating your profile after months of inactivity will probably tip them off. IMO any response that isn't "we have turned off this feature and will re-evaluate" is no bueno.
greggarious 11y ago
Our of curiosity, does AngelList have a chief privacy officer, or even a privacy manager or subject matter expert embedded with the engineers? (Until this moment I wasn't familiar with the service - I mostly get jobs through friends and former coworkers.) I understand some companies are not large enough to have a dedicated privacy professional, but as someone who knows quite a bit about it, it's really frustrating when the response to something like this is "whoops! here are the steps we are taking to correct this". Don't get me wrong Dave: This is a great response and you sound like you truly want to avoid incidents in the futures. Kudos for that - many companies would simply quote their privacy policy and offer up a feeble "Sorry you're sorry." But this is more than a one time bug to be quashed. IMHO all companies (even small startups) should endeavor to move beyond reactive solutions like this, and put processes and controls in place so that these incidents never happen to begin with. If you or anyone reading this is on the fence, think of it as marketing. Marketing in the sense of providing a quality product that fulfills a need, and makes other people want to buy your product because it's solid and good.
- colinplamondon 11y ago
  Just want to throw out, I love your comment. Positive, understanding, while directly questioning on a serious issue.
scott_s 11y ago
"I'm sorry" is an apology. "Please accept our apologies" is a reference to an apology.
- hoorayimhelping 11y ago
  Seriously? The whole post is an apology. A guy named Dave is publicly saying he screwed up. He's saying his name, he's wrapping his identity up in this screw up, he's giving reasoning into their decision and what they're doing to fix it, and he's providing ways to give suggestions to fix this. But this isn't good enough to you because literally the words "I'm" and "sorry" weren't next to each other? If he didn't take the time to respond and explain things, you might have a point. But this seems like a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't fit the response that was given by Dave.
  - davemel37 11y ago
    I think people are angry because they consider the impersonation to be dishonest, whereas Dave and Angel list seem to think the grievance is not about being spammy but rather about not being open about the spammy practice. I think his point was that this is a non-apology in his eyes because it doesn't say "were going to stop this practice, but rather just make it clearer to users what they will do. In other words, the apology is for the grievance of stabbing you in the back, so now were going to stab you to your face. Note, I don't share this concern but I certainly get where he is coming from... The semantic argument he made was just a manifestation of the frustration of what he considers a non-apology.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    No no -- they're going to put gray text in 4 point font at the bottom of the page saying they're gonna email your ceo. Cool? Cool...
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I was slightly miffed once when I said "You're right and I will apologize" and the other person insisted on hearing the words "I'm sorry". That person, however, was a Chinese high school student, not a native speaker of English. What's your excuse?
diskcat 11y ago
This is damage control. You clearly want to make people update their profiles or whatever by pretending to be somebody else they know. You went with an immoral strategy to grow your business and that now it has finally hit you in the face on a very visible website you are here to be all apologetics. It's the "easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission" strategy and it is deliberate thus I must conclude that your apology is insincere and is only an attempt at limiting the backlash against you.
sboselli 11y ago
I'm speechless. That's an absolutely terrible idea. Are you guys trying to sends us all back to LinkedIn? Any kind of notification is a dead give away you're looking for another job. I guess this goes to show that AngelList is all about the "Angels" and gives no f*cks about the talent. Shameful and sad. Time to kiss AngelList goodbye.
- tajen 11y ago
  How many upvotes do you have? I think this number could be interesting either way.
  - owenversteeg 11y ago
    20. You can check because they're a green user, and they have one comment, from their profile.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      I just upvoted them again. That number is still at 20. I wonder if they're seeing a higher number? Or maybe my upvotes aren't doing anything? (Except I just upvoted you, and that seemed to increase your karma.)
      - owenversteeg 11y ago
        Pretty sure the upvotes do something, but green accounts take longer to update the karma for. Or something like that - not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure the 20 is indicative of their karma at some unspecified point in the past. dang, what's causing this? Also, I just upvoted you, and your karma didn't change (stayed at 35897.) Interesting stuff.
- kayman 11y ago
  Oh Angellist, how I will avoid you now like a plague. I had such high hopes for you. Sigh...back to face to face networking.
- 11y ago
alpb 11y ago
Giving your email address apparently is useless. People on this thread are saying you don't ever respond to emails. Just search: > Their support is absolutely non-existent. I heard nothing back from them whatsoever, after sending several emails.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  I've asked him directly why he didn't respond to my email, and given him the date (more than a year ago) for him to check on it. I sent several more emails, because the longer I tried to get my profile the way I wanted it, the more diverse glitches I encountered. Here is a run-down: 1) Added a company I used to work for. Went to the company's page, and looked at the Jobs section. Saw a button that said "[checkbox] Sent" in a context that meant that AngelList had sent a job application to my former employer on my behalf. In retrospect, it's even worse than I realized at the time: I now know that the email headers claimed it came directly from me, and the text was written in the first person. There was no way to delete a job application, or list all job applications that AngleList randomly decided to send on my behalf. 2) Entering jobs is very difficult and clumsy. Imported jobs from my Facebook history. Only some of them showed up. 3) The ordering of the jobs I imported was random, not sorted by date. 4) I attempted to re-order the jobs myself. I was totally baffled why some of them show up in the large sections at the top, but many others are listed below in a paragraph with just their names. How can I control which jobs appear as larger sections, instead of as a list of names? 5) I entered another job and it appeared at the top of the page, and I went into reorder mode, and I was not able to drag it up or down — it was pinned to the top of the list. And afterwards it actually disappeared from the list! 6) And the first time I was entering jobs it did not allow me to enter a description, but now it is asking for a description, and I don’t know why it suddenly changed. 7) It's impossible to enter the same company name twice. I worked for Sun Microsystems as an intern, and later I was employed full time. I worked for EA full time, and later worked as a contractor. Those should be listed as separate jobs, during separate times. LinkedIn certainly supports that. 8) How do I represent being hired by one company, that's then bought by another company (like EA bought Maxis)? Or that spins off another company (like Sun Microsystem split off SunSoft). This kind of stuff happens all the time in the industry, so it should not be impossible to describe. 9) The triangular "EXIT" corner on company description boxes renders incorrectly, with scrambled text. This is not rocket science. I included a screen dump of the error and Chrome debugger DOM tree to show what was wrong. 10) But the larger problem from a user interface design perspective is that it's terrible to use a call to action verb like "EXIT" in what looks like an orange triangular "EXIT" sign, which falsely affords clicking on it to exit the page. 11) What is so important about a company "exiting" that it deserves such a prominent raggedy orange dog-ear "EXIT" sign on the company listing? What's important is what I did at that company, not the incidental fact that it was bought by another company. That's just buzzword bingo fetishism. Do they hand out green "PIVOT" tags and red "BANKRUPT" tags too? 12) I am listed as both "Employee" and "Past Employee" of one of my former employers. I don't have any control over that, apparently. I encountered even more problems I didn't have time to write up, but obviously after spending so much time trying to work around those problems, then writing them up, sending them into team@angel.co, then waiting more than a year for a reply, I have not wasted any more time on my AngelList profile, even though I had to leave it in an incorrect, embarrassing state. I probably should have deleted my AngelList account a long time ago, after not receiving a reply within a week or so. Perhaps some of these problems are already solved, after more than a year since I reported them. And perhaps some of the privacy problems will finally be solved now that many other people have announced they deleted their accounts. My partner asked me to enter the information more than a year ago, because he was raising money and he assumed investors would want to look at that site. So I put a lot of time and effort into trying to get it right, but was unsuccessful, and left it hanging for more than a year. But now he is afraid that the old boys network will be annoyed because I posted about the problems I had with the AngelList web site. So I sincerely apologize if I've inadvertently offended anyone, because all I wanted to do was to have some control over the information that AngelList was publishing about me and the email that they were sending on my behalf.
RickS 11y ago
> We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. The correct answer was > The interface now yells loudly when a change would notify anyone but yourself, with the option not to send that notification. When doing a thing spams other people, we stop doing the thing.
- zyxley 11y ago
  Exactly. If this isn't changed... bye-bye AngelList account.
jackmaney 11y ago
Here's an idea: turn off ALL notifications by default. Make any notifications opt-in only.
- exolymph 11y ago
  praying hands emoji As a side note, I love that Apple enforces this in iOS.
btilly 11y ago
Here is what you are missing. When people join a company, that is the last time that most of us think about updating our profile so that we will be ready to leave. When people leave a company, we realize that we have to and do it. And everyone around us knows what that means because that is what they do as well. You therefore need to create a way to distinguish between verified and unverified positions. And default to making the current job unverified exactly because of this problem.
randommodnar 11y ago
Why e-mail the employer at all? I'm bewildered. This is terrible. If I add a project to my AngelList profile and it e-mails my employer, it will send one signal and only one signal: I'm looking for another job. Why the heck does AngelList think this is a good idea? If the choice is between (a) not using AngelList, and (b) having an uncomfortable conversation with my bosses about an e-mail they received, then sorry, I'm going with (a).
thaumasiotes 11y ago
I see the following issues causing grief in the comment thread: 1. (a) AngelList sent out email on [my] (not me) behalf by surprise. 1. (b) AngelList sent out email on [my] behalf as a result of something [I] did on their site. 2. AngelList sent out email that appeared to have been written by [me]. 3. AngelList notified [my] employer that [I]'d updated my resume. (The headline complaint, in fact!) This response addresses (1a) and (2), and it's understandable that you might not want to swear off (1b) entirely (although it does seem to be a source of resentment). You've completely failed to respond to (3), though, which I find surprising because it was the headline complaint. Adding projects to your resume is sine-qua-non functionality on a job hunting site; pretending that you're not job hunting is more or less required by office decorum. Does AngelList provide a way of listing projects you've done at your current company without notifying your boss that you're looking to leave? It's nice that you don't show candidates on AngelList to employers who are already employing them, but without the ability to update your resume you don't have much.
eecks 11y ago
... You've just lost a user
jasonm23 11y ago
Hi Dave, I won't go into the merits, or lack of them re: the overall method of handling this issue. Others are covering this well. > We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. This is not good. If your users tag a company and you are planning to "maybe notify that company of activity on your profile" that still shows negative ambiguity, (a) just don't do this, or if you must (b) specifically ask your user to opt in on this activity notification, and state exactly what you will share. Of course, this quickly enumerates into a list of things the majority of people would opt out of at, so that should be a clue that you are trying to add features to your product, that none of your users want.
dzohrob 11y ago
UPDATE: To everyone worried about their privacy on AngelList: We’re sorry. Thanks for all your feedback. We’ve made more changes: 1) We stopped using the first-person on all emails. We wrote that first-person notification literally 5 years ago when we had a few thousand users, and we never re-visited it. It was pretty stupid. Now they all clearly come from AngelList. 2) We won’t send notifications to companies when you add them to a project. We used to because the project shows up on the company profile too. But it’s not what people expect, so we stopped, and we stopped showing the projects on company profiles too. Thanks again. Dave AngelList
DonHopkins 11y ago
Why didn't you respond when I asked team@angel.co why you mistakenly sent one of my former employers an email telling them that I wanted to apply for a job with them, and ignored me when I asked you to cancel that application? I sent the message on 29 January 2015 at 11:09 CET. And then why didn't you respond to any of my subsequent emails with detailed descriptions and screen snapshots of other problems I encountered? Is it not enough for one user to report a privacy problem, so you decided not to acknowledge my report, but to wait more than a year until it became a huge public issue that caused hundreds of people to delete their accounts?
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  Dave: It's been three days since your last comment, an no response. [1] Well, your lack of response to my and everyone else's questions certainly confirms my impression about AngelList, and says a lot more than your non-apology apology did. I gave you more than a fair chance to respond, provided you the date and time of my unanswered message from more than a year ago, and even gave you a second chance in case you deleted my year-old email, by sinking even more of my time into summarizing the problems I originally reported to you, and posting them here for you to read again. [2] But still: no response from you, as more and more people continue to announce they're deleting their AngelList accounts. You're asleep at the wheel, the lights are on, but nobody's home. If your attention has wandered on to other things, and you no longer have any interest in maintaining your web site or responding to your users for over a year, then you really should shut it down gracefully, and save everyone from wasting their time and having their privacy unexpectedly violated. Old unmaintained web sites running on auto-pilot that collect sensitive private information from their users (and automatically forge first-person email pretending to be from their users in order to virally promote themselves) are a dangerous security threat, which should be shut down for the safety of the internet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd0fBXwDBmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd0fBXwDBmo [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350697

by dzohrob 11y ago

DiNovi 11y ago

Of course, updating your profile after months of inactivity will probably tip them off. IMO any response that isn't "we have turned off this feature and will re-evaluate" is no bueno.

greggarious 11y ago

Our of curiosity, does AngelList have a chief privacy officer, or even a privacy manager or subject matter expert embedded with the engineers? (Until this moment I wasn't familiar with the service - I mostly get jobs through friends and former coworkers.) I understand some companies are not large enough to have a dedicated privacy professional, but as someone who knows quite a bit about it, it's really frustrating when the response to something like this is "whoops! here are the steps we are taking to correct this". Don't get me wrong Dave: This is a great response and you sound like you truly want to avoid incidents in the futures. Kudos for that - many companies would simply quote their privacy policy and offer up a feeble "Sorry you're sorry." But this is more than a one time bug to be quashed. IMHO all companies (even small startups) should endeavor to move beyond reactive solutions like this, and put processes and controls in place so that these incidents never happen to begin with. If you or anyone reading this is on the fence, think of it as marketing. Marketing in the sense of providing a quality product that fulfills a need, and makes other people want to buy your product because it's solid and good.

colinplamondon 11y ago
Just want to throw out, I love your comment. Positive, understanding, while directly questioning on a serious issue.

scott_s 11y ago

"I'm sorry" is an apology. "Please accept our apologies" is a reference to an apology.

hoorayimhelping 11y ago
Seriously? The whole post is an apology. A guy named Dave is publicly saying he screwed up. He's saying his name, he's wrapping his identity up in this screw up, he's giving reasoning into their decision and what they're doing to fix it, and he's providing ways to give suggestions to fix this. But this isn't good enough to you because literally the words "I'm" and "sorry" weren't next to each other? If he didn't take the time to respond and explain things, you might have a point. But this seems like a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't fit the response that was given by Dave.
- davemel37 11y ago
  I think people are angry because they consider the impersonation to be dishonest, whereas Dave and Angel list seem to think the grievance is not about being spammy but rather about not being open about the spammy practice. I think his point was that this is a non-apology in his eyes because it doesn't say "were going to stop this practice, but rather just make it clearer to users what they will do. In other words, the apology is for the grievance of stabbing you in the back, so now were going to stab you to your face. Note, I don't share this concern but I certainly get where he is coming from... The semantic argument he made was just a manifestation of the frustration of what he considers a non-apology.
- x0x0 11y ago
  No no -- they're going to put gray text in 4 point font at the bottom of the page saying they're gonna email your ceo. Cool? Cool...
thaumasiotes 11y ago
I was slightly miffed once when I said "You're right and I will apologize" and the other person insisted on hearing the words "I'm sorry". That person, however, was a Chinese high school student, not a native speaker of English. What's your excuse?

diskcat 11y ago

This is damage control. You clearly want to make people update their profiles or whatever by pretending to be somebody else they know. You went with an immoral strategy to grow your business and that now it has finally hit you in the face on a very visible website you are here to be all apologetics. It's the "easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission" strategy and it is deliberate thus I must conclude that your apology is insincere and is only an attempt at limiting the backlash against you.

sboselli 11y ago

I'm speechless. That's an absolutely terrible idea. Are you guys trying to sends us all back to LinkedIn? Any kind of notification is a dead give away you're looking for another job. I guess this goes to show that AngelList is all about the "Angels" and gives no f*cks about the talent. Shameful and sad. Time to kiss AngelList goodbye.

tajen 11y ago
How many upvotes do you have? I think this number could be interesting either way.
- owenversteeg 11y ago
  20. You can check because they're a green user, and they have one comment, from their profile.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    I just upvoted them again. That number is still at 20. I wonder if they're seeing a higher number? Or maybe my upvotes aren't doing anything? (Except I just upvoted you, and that seemed to increase your karma.)
    - owenversteeg 11y ago
      Pretty sure the upvotes do something, but green accounts take longer to update the karma for. Or something like that - not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure the 20 is indicative of their karma at some unspecified point in the past. dang, what's causing this? Also, I just upvoted you, and your karma didn't change (stayed at 35897.) Interesting stuff.
kayman 11y ago
Oh Angellist, how I will avoid you now like a plague. I had such high hopes for you. Sigh...back to face to face networking.
11y ago

alpb 11y ago

Giving your email address apparently is useless. People on this thread are saying you don't ever respond to emails. Just search: > Their support is absolutely non-existent. I heard nothing back from them whatsoever, after sending several emails.

DonHopkins 11y ago
I've asked him directly why he didn't respond to my email, and given him the date (more than a year ago) for him to check on it. I sent several more emails, because the longer I tried to get my profile the way I wanted it, the more diverse glitches I encountered. Here is a run-down: 1) Added a company I used to work for. Went to the company's page, and looked at the Jobs section. Saw a button that said "[checkbox] Sent" in a context that meant that AngelList had sent a job application to my former employer on my behalf. In retrospect, it's even worse than I realized at the time: I now know that the email headers claimed it came directly from me, and the text was written in the first person. There was no way to delete a job application, or list all job applications that AngleList randomly decided to send on my behalf. 2) Entering jobs is very difficult and clumsy. Imported jobs from my Facebook history. Only some of them showed up. 3) The ordering of the jobs I imported was random, not sorted by date. 4) I attempted to re-order the jobs myself. I was totally baffled why some of them show up in the large sections at the top, but many others are listed below in a paragraph with just their names. How can I control which jobs appear as larger sections, instead of as a list of names? 5) I entered another job and it appeared at the top of the page, and I went into reorder mode, and I was not able to drag it up or down — it was pinned to the top of the list. And afterwards it actually disappeared from the list! 6) And the first time I was entering jobs it did not allow me to enter a description, but now it is asking for a description, and I don’t know why it suddenly changed. 7) It's impossible to enter the same company name twice. I worked for Sun Microsystems as an intern, and later I was employed full time. I worked for EA full time, and later worked as a contractor. Those should be listed as separate jobs, during separate times. LinkedIn certainly supports that. 8) How do I represent being hired by one company, that's then bought by another company (like EA bought Maxis)? Or that spins off another company (like Sun Microsystem split off SunSoft). This kind of stuff happens all the time in the industry, so it should not be impossible to describe. 9) The triangular "EXIT" corner on company description boxes renders incorrectly, with scrambled text. This is not rocket science. I included a screen dump of the error and Chrome debugger DOM tree to show what was wrong. 10) But the larger problem from a user interface design perspective is that it's terrible to use a call to action verb like "EXIT" in what looks like an orange triangular "EXIT" sign, which falsely affords clicking on it to exit the page. 11) What is so important about a company "exiting" that it deserves such a prominent raggedy orange dog-ear "EXIT" sign on the company listing? What's important is what I did at that company, not the incidental fact that it was bought by another company. That's just buzzword bingo fetishism. Do they hand out green "PIVOT" tags and red "BANKRUPT" tags too? 12) I am listed as both "Employee" and "Past Employee" of one of my former employers. I don't have any control over that, apparently. I encountered even more problems I didn't have time to write up, but obviously after spending so much time trying to work around those problems, then writing them up, sending them into team@angel.co, then waiting more than a year for a reply, I have not wasted any more time on my AngelList profile, even though I had to leave it in an incorrect, embarrassing state. I probably should have deleted my AngelList account a long time ago, after not receiving a reply within a week or so. Perhaps some of these problems are already solved, after more than a year since I reported them. And perhaps some of the privacy problems will finally be solved now that many other people have announced they deleted their accounts. My partner asked me to enter the information more than a year ago, because he was raising money and he assumed investors would want to look at that site. So I put a lot of time and effort into trying to get it right, but was unsuccessful, and left it hanging for more than a year. But now he is afraid that the old boys network will be annoyed because I posted about the problems I had with the AngelList web site. So I sincerely apologize if I've inadvertently offended anyone, because all I wanted to do was to have some control over the information that AngelList was publishing about me and the email that they were sending on my behalf.

RickS 11y ago

> We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. The correct answer was > The interface now yells loudly when a change would notify anyone but yourself, with the option not to send that notification. When doing a thing spams other people, we stop doing the thing.

zyxley 11y ago
Exactly. If this isn't changed... bye-bye AngelList account.

jackmaney 11y ago

Here's an idea: turn off ALL notifications by default. Make any notifications opt-in only.

exolymph 11y ago
praying hands emoji As a side note, I love that Apple enforces this in iOS.

btilly 11y ago

Here is what you are missing. When people join a company, that is the last time that most of us think about updating our profile so that we will be ready to leave. When people leave a company, we realize that we have to and do it. And everyone around us knows what that means because that is what they do as well. You therefore need to create a way to distinguish between verified and unverified positions. And default to making the current job unverified exactly because of this problem.

randommodnar 11y ago

Why e-mail the employer at all? I'm bewildered. This is terrible. If I add a project to my AngelList profile and it e-mails my employer, it will send one signal and only one signal: I'm looking for another job. Why the heck does AngelList think this is a good idea? If the choice is between (a) not using AngelList, and (b) having an uncomfortable conversation with my bosses about an e-mail they received, then sorry, I'm going with (a).

thaumasiotes 11y ago

I see the following issues causing grief in the comment thread: 1. (a) AngelList sent out email on [my] (not me) behalf by surprise. 1. (b) AngelList sent out email on [my] behalf as a result of something [I] did on their site. 2. AngelList sent out email that appeared to have been written by [me]. 3. AngelList notified [my] employer that [I]'d updated my resume. (The headline complaint, in fact!) This response addresses (1a) and (2), and it's understandable that you might not want to swear off (1b) entirely (although it does seem to be a source of resentment). You've completely failed to respond to (3), though, which I find surprising because it was the headline complaint. Adding projects to your resume is sine-qua-non functionality on a job hunting site; pretending that you're not job hunting is more or less required by office decorum. Does AngelList provide a way of listing projects you've done at your current company without notifying your boss that you're looking to leave? It's nice that you don't show candidates on AngelList to employers who are already employing them, but without the ability to update your resume you don't have much.

eecks 11y ago

... You've just lost a user

jasonm23 11y ago

Hi Dave, I won't go into the merits, or lack of them re: the overall method of handling this issue. Others are covering this well. > We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. This is not good. If your users tag a company and you are planning to "maybe notify that company of activity on your profile" that still shows negative ambiguity, (a) just don't do this, or if you must (b) specifically ask your user to opt in on this activity notification, and state exactly what you will share. Of course, this quickly enumerates into a list of things the majority of people would opt out of at, so that should be a clue that you are trying to add features to your product, that none of your users want.

dzohrob 11y ago

UPDATE: To everyone worried about their privacy on AngelList: We’re sorry. Thanks for all your feedback. We’ve made more changes: 1) We stopped using the first-person on all emails. We wrote that first-person notification literally 5 years ago when we had a few thousand users, and we never re-visited it. It was pretty stupid. Now they all clearly come from AngelList. 2) We won’t send notifications to companies when you add them to a project. We used to because the project shows up on the company profile too. But it’s not what people expect, so we stopped, and we stopped showing the projects on company profiles too. Thanks again. Dave AngelList

DonHopkins 11y ago

Why didn't you respond when I asked team@angel.co why you mistakenly sent one of my former employers an email telling them that I wanted to apply for a job with them, and ignored me when I asked you to cancel that application? I sent the message on 29 January 2015 at 11:09 CET. And then why didn't you respond to any of my subsequent emails with detailed descriptions and screen snapshots of other problems I encountered? Is it not enough for one user to report a privacy problem, so you decided not to acknowledge my report, but to wait more than a year until it became a huge public issue that caused hundreds of people to delete their accounts?

DonHopkins 11y ago
Dave: It's been three days since your last comment, an no response. [1] Well, your lack of response to my and everyone else's questions certainly confirms my impression about AngelList, and says a lot more than your non-apology apology did. I gave you more than a fair chance to respond, provided you the date and time of my unanswered message from more than a year ago, and even gave you a second chance in case you deleted my year-old email, by sinking even more of my time into summarizing the problems I originally reported to you, and posting them here for you to read again. [2] But still: no response from you, as more and more people continue to announce they're deleting their AngelList accounts. You're asleep at the wheel, the lights are on, but nobody's home. If your attention has wandered on to other things, and you no longer have any interest in maintaining your web site or responding to your users for over a year, then you really should shut it down gracefully, and save everyone from wasting their time and having their privacy unexpectedly violated. Old unmaintained web sites running on auto-pilot that collect sensitive private information from their users (and automatically forge first-person email pretending to be from their users in order to virally promote themselves) are a dangerous security threat, which should be shut down for the safety of the internet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd0fBXwDBmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd0fBXwDBmo [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350697