3 ms·

Its not a crazy business model. My early stage company gets nearly all of its revenue from a product no one in engineering has touched in over a year, which fun

Its not a crazy business model. My early stage company gets nearly all of its revenue from a product no one in engineering has touched in over a year, which funds some more intensive and risky product development. Similarly, DuoLingo has a foundation in teaching languages while building up a large supervised data set for machine translation. A lot of companies are basically fronts for getting average folks to either curate a label set or provide permission to access existing data. My old company provided a vague statement like, "Improve your experience, integrate your gmail account", providing quite literally nothing to customers except remove the button, yet provided us unlimited access to contact books and emails/attachments, many of which were very private and confidential. Not proud of that one, but thats the reality and for some people, very profitable.

spacehome 10y ago
Wow, that's nuts. My gmail account is the gateway to password resetting a bunch of different accounts, not to mention all the private correspondences. It would have to be quite the value proposition to make me give up the keys. And these idiots give it away for nothing at all?
- laxatives 10y ago
  Yes. We had numerous SSN and bank account details, basically anything you might find in a personal or professional email inbox. Obviously we weren't making use of any of this, but if we had one malicious engineer, things could have gone very poorly. One automated tool inadvertently posted an individual's SSN on the paid version of our site was very angry. The level of access was something we were always discouraged from discussing with sales folks and management always kept things very vague.
  - thucydides 10y ago
    Holy... Okay, just went to https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions and revoked permissions for a bunch of apps. Thanks for this story.
  - rpgmaker 10y ago
    Can you actually give that kind of gmail access to third party apps? Luckily I don't but it's unnerving to think that doing so can have those ramifications.
triplesec 10y ago
I'm not clear exactly what that old company of yours did, and its putative value proposition for clients. Remove a button, where for what? Very curious!

spacehome 10y ago

Wow, that's nuts. My gmail account is the gateway to password resetting a bunch of different accounts, not to mention all the private correspondences. It would have to be quite the value proposition to make me give up the keys. And these idiots give it away for nothing at all?

laxatives 10y ago
Yes. We had numerous SSN and bank account details, basically anything you might find in a personal or professional email inbox. Obviously we weren't making use of any of this, but if we had one malicious engineer, things could have gone very poorly. One automated tool inadvertently posted an individual's SSN on the paid version of our site was very angry. The level of access was something we were always discouraged from discussing with sales folks and management always kept things very vague.
- thucydides 10y ago
  Holy... Okay, just went to https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions and revoked permissions for a bunch of apps. Thanks for this story.
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  Can you actually give that kind of gmail access to third party apps? Luckily I don't but it's unnerving to think that doing so can have those ramifications.

triplesec 10y ago

I'm not clear exactly what that old company of yours did, and its putative value proposition for clients. Remove a button, where for what? Very curious!