7 ms·

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

by rosser 10y ago

jldugger 10y ago
While it's generally true, I'm not sure that's really an excuse for deceptive behavior.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  The saying isn't meant to be an excuse for companies, it's a reminder to end users to pay attention what they're signing up for. Situations like this one are exactly why the saying became popular.
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    Like i said below, the most obvious expectation was thinking that they would monetize with ads, which is why people didn't think twice about this. There's a difference between ad supported businesses and business that actually directly sell user data behind the scenes. Equating all the ad-supported businesses with this case is not really fair because the types of businesses you're talking about here are not actually literally selling you out. They are simply pushing you ads on THEIR platform which YOU agreed to use. Sure there are lots of shady things going on in this department as well, but it's a completely different game than what this looks like. Based on this article it looks like they took your data and actually sold it to a third party, this is different from simply displaying ads on their platform. They literally sold you. And it happened OFF of the platform you signed up for.
    - paep3nguin 10y ago
      You're describing my assumptions exactly! I incorrectly assumed that the occasional ads for Dashlane, HelloFresh, etc. in the "Daily Rollup" were how they monetized their service. But hey, turns out they're straight up selling my emails to third-parties. I've deleted my account and revoked their access on my Google account.
  - kristianc 10y ago
    It's trite, and aside from belonging in the big dustbin of Hacker News cliches like linking to XKCD Standards, 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should' and 'Conflating Causation and Correlation' in this case it obscures more than it illuminates. A product may be free - and you may still be happy to be the product if you think your attention is being sold, or that they plan to upsell you onto a premium plan. 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for.
    - gdulli 10y ago
      How is it nefarious for Uber to use anonymized data to come to conclusions like: 1. Emails with subject [xxx] are opened more often than emails with subject [yyy]. 2. Lyft does more business in Scottsdale than we expected. 3. 25% of people who use ridesharing use multiple services and 75% are loyal to one service. 4. 33% of people who don't use ridesharing services also don't use traditional taxi services. "Nefarious" is a strong word.
    - CodeMage 10y ago
      > 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for. I agree with the first half of what you said and disagree with the second. That's precisely the value of the original saying: it's not there to be an excuse for a company, it's there to spread awareness and remind people that they should get informed about just _how_ they're being productized _before_ they have cause to regret using the service. If more of us scanned the ToS carefully, we might catch the nefarious bits of fuckery on time and pressure the company to change. Does the privacy policy say your data will be sold to third parties? Great, find out what data, to what third parties and questions like that.
- gdulli 10y ago
  Since the privacy policy explains in clear English that your data will be sold it would be more deceptive if they didn't sell your data.
  - Spivak 10y ago
    And since no one actually reads the privacy policy, users likely expect that the only data they're retaining is about email subscriptions, and that it will only be used internally and not sold to 3rd parties. It's still unethical.
    - gdulli 10y ago
      If someone has strict privacy needs, why wouldn't they read the privacy policy? Read it or don't read it, it's your choice. But if you choose not to, don't complain that the terms you agreed to don't work the way you arbitrarily expected them to. That's on you, it's not unethical that the terms don't work the way you want them to.
      - matt4077 10y ago
        So you've read every TOS for every iTunes, or Android, or Windows update, ever? And if not, you'd be fine with handing over the keys for your house if one of them had a sentence in there that transferred it to Apple/Google/MS?
pyre 10y ago
If you take out a loan from a loan shark, you should probably know what to expect. That doesn't mean that the loan shark isn't breaking the law when you get roughed up for non-payment.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Also, the thing is this is not really the loan shark situation. People who go to loan shark know exactly what they're getting into--borrowing money. People who signed up for unroll.me signed up because they got sick of all the the spammers and wanted to get away from all that easily. Most people including me, thought they would somehow monetize with ads or something like that, but never thought they would sell our info to 3rd parties like this. So No, it wasn't at all obvious what to expect.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    It would be an interesting challenge to popularize free services as loan-sharking your personal information.
  - uzoodoo 10y ago
    You have to be naive to give a service access to a trove of your private data and expect them to just leave it there...
    - Spivak 10y ago
      Are we really at the point where people are being called naive for trusting a company to act ethically? It's no wonder people outside of tech hate us.
      - uzoodoo 10y ago
        Companies only act ethically if it has a potential to affect their bottom line and they have the foresight. It's not just tech, think pharmaceuticals or finance. As for naivete - as the old saying goes, the only free cheese is in a mousetrap.
sgustard 10y ago
>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.
- abritishguy 10y ago
  But if you aren't paying then they must be making money elsewhere.
- gdulli 10y ago
  If X then Y doesn't imply anything about not-X, but that doesn't mean it's less useful for describing X. It's moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.
- jwdunne 10y ago
  In the UK, O2 has a line in their terms and conditions that pretty much say they're allowed to sell your data to 3rd parties. Now it's obvious why I've got people calling me asking about my recent loan that may have had PPI or that traumatic car crash I was in a few years ago, even though I've never in my life on both fronts. It's my bloody carrier! If you use Google, shop in a supermarket, use a mobile phone, have the internet, your data is being collected and, in most cases, being sold to "chosen partners for marketing purposes". Everyone's doing it because they can make money from it.
- rosser 10y ago
  Whether I'm paying for a service is orthogonal to what its ToS allows them to do with my data. When I'm not paying for it, you can be pretty confident the ToS explicitly allows it, with even money on its being phrased in abstrusely arcane legalese. They have to make money somehow...
- goflyapig 10y ago
  So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? No. A statement's truth doesn't imply its inverse [1]. It simply means if a company has employees, and they're receiving paychecks, and the money is not coming from you, then it's definitely coming from someone else. If you are giving them money, it doesn't mean they're not also getting money from somewhere else. But they're less likely to need to do that, especially if it would upset their paying customers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

by rosser 10y ago

From their own site: "Unroll.Me is a free service", emphasis added. If it's free for you, you're the product.

jldugger 10y ago

While it's generally true, I'm not sure that's really an excuse for deceptive behavior.

jlarocco 10y ago
The saying isn't meant to be an excuse for companies, it's a reminder to end users to pay attention what they're signing up for. Situations like this one are exactly why the saying became popular.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Like i said below, the most obvious expectation was thinking that they would monetize with ads, which is why people didn't think twice about this. There's a difference between ad supported businesses and business that actually directly sell user data behind the scenes. Equating all the ad-supported businesses with this case is not really fair because the types of businesses you're talking about here are not actually literally selling you out. They are simply pushing you ads on THEIR platform which YOU agreed to use. Sure there are lots of shady things going on in this department as well, but it's a completely different game than what this looks like. Based on this article it looks like they took your data and actually sold it to a third party, this is different from simply displaying ads on their platform. They literally sold you. And it happened OFF of the platform you signed up for.
  - paep3nguin 10y ago
    You're describing my assumptions exactly! I incorrectly assumed that the occasional ads for Dashlane, HelloFresh, etc. in the "Daily Rollup" were how they monetized their service. But hey, turns out they're straight up selling my emails to third-parties. I've deleted my account and revoked their access on my Google account.
- kristianc 10y ago
  It's trite, and aside from belonging in the big dustbin of Hacker News cliches like linking to XKCD Standards, 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should' and 'Conflating Causation and Correlation' in this case it obscures more than it illuminates. A product may be free - and you may still be happy to be the product if you think your attention is being sold, or that they plan to upsell you onto a premium plan. 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for.
  - gdulli 10y ago
    How is it nefarious for Uber to use anonymized data to come to conclusions like: 1. Emails with subject [xxx] are opened more often than emails with subject [yyy]. 2. Lyft does more business in Scottsdale than we expected. 3. 25% of people who use ridesharing use multiple services and 75% are loyal to one service. 4. 33% of people who don't use ridesharing services also don't use traditional taxi services. "Nefarious" is a strong word.
  - CodeMage 10y ago
    > 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for. I agree with the first half of what you said and disagree with the second. That's precisely the value of the original saying: it's not there to be an excuse for a company, it's there to spread awareness and remind people that they should get informed about just _how_ they're being productized _before_ they have cause to regret using the service. If more of us scanned the ToS carefully, we might catch the nefarious bits of fuckery on time and pressure the company to change. Does the privacy policy say your data will be sold to third parties? Great, find out what data, to what third parties and questions like that.
gdulli 10y ago
Since the privacy policy explains in clear English that your data will be sold it would be more deceptive if they didn't sell your data.
- Spivak 10y ago
  And since no one actually reads the privacy policy, users likely expect that the only data they're retaining is about email subscriptions, and that it will only be used internally and not sold to 3rd parties. It's still unethical.
  - gdulli 10y ago
    If someone has strict privacy needs, why wouldn't they read the privacy policy? Read it or don't read it, it's your choice. But if you choose not to, don't complain that the terms you agreed to don't work the way you arbitrarily expected them to. That's on you, it's not unethical that the terms don't work the way you want them to.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      So you've read every TOS for every iTunes, or Android, or Windows update, ever? And if not, you'd be fine with handing over the keys for your house if one of them had a sentence in there that transferred it to Apple/Google/MS?

pyre 10y ago

If you take out a loan from a loan shark, you should probably know what to expect. That doesn't mean that the loan shark isn't breaking the law when you get roughed up for non-payment.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Also, the thing is this is not really the loan shark situation. People who go to loan shark know exactly what they're getting into--borrowing money. People who signed up for unroll.me signed up because they got sick of all the the spammers and wanted to get away from all that easily. Most people including me, thought they would somehow monetize with ads or something like that, but never thought they would sell our info to 3rd parties like this. So No, it wasn't at all obvious what to expect.
- rhizome 10y ago
  It would be an interesting challenge to popularize free services as loan-sharking your personal information.
- uzoodoo 10y ago
  You have to be naive to give a service access to a trove of your private data and expect them to just leave it there...
  - Spivak 10y ago
    Are we really at the point where people are being called naive for trusting a company to act ethically? It's no wonder people outside of tech hate us.
    - uzoodoo 10y ago
      Companies only act ethically if it has a potential to affect their bottom line and they have the foresight. It's not just tech, think pharmaceuticals or finance. As for naivete - as the old saying goes, the only free cheese is in a mousetrap.

sgustard 10y ago

>If it's free for you, you're the product. So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? Since the answer is obviously no (and in fact, purchasing behavior is the juiciest stuff to sell, be it Comcast, Target, etc), then this tired trope is meaningless.

abritishguy 10y ago
But if you aren't paying then they must be making money elsewhere.
gdulli 10y ago
If X then Y doesn't imply anything about not-X, but that doesn't mean it's less useful for describing X. It's moot anyway because the answer is out there publicly and no heuristic is needed to resolve it.
jwdunne 10y ago
In the UK, O2 has a line in their terms and conditions that pretty much say they're allowed to sell your data to 3rd parties. Now it's obvious why I've got people calling me asking about my recent loan that may have had PPI or that traumatic car crash I was in a few years ago, even though I've never in my life on both fronts. It's my bloody carrier! If you use Google, shop in a supermarket, use a mobile phone, have the internet, your data is being collected and, in most cases, being sold to "chosen partners for marketing purposes". Everyone's doing it because they can make money from it.
rosser 10y ago
Whether I'm paying for a service is orthogonal to what its ToS allows them to do with my data. When I'm not paying for it, you can be pretty confident the ToS explicitly allows it, with even money on its being phrased in abstrusely arcane legalese. They have to make money somehow...
goflyapig 10y ago
So hypothetically, if you paid $5 a month for this service, you would be confident they were NOT selling your information? No. A statement's truth doesn't imply its inverse [1]. It simply means if a company has employees, and they're receiving paychecks, and the money is not coming from you, then it's definitely coming from someone else. If you are giving them money, it doesn't mean they're not also getting money from somewhere else. But they're less likely to need to do that, especially if it would upset their paying customers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent