21 ms·
So, I checked out Cyberleads[1], and...this dude is just literally (and brazenly) selling a list of startup executives' emails without their permission or conse
by thisisbrians 6y ago
So, I checked out Cyberleads[1], and...this dude is just literally (and brazenly) selling a list of startup executives' emails without their permission or consent. Not sure if that's even legal, but it's definitely scummy, and I hate when I get cold (and frequently, also technically SPAM) emails like the ones this guys is enabling.
Here's a direct quote from the site[1]:
Every day, we scour the web and find every single startup that just
raised money. We collect information about these companies, like
revenue, size, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, CEO information,
emails, and much more.
We then further investigate, and verify manually every entry on the
list. Every single data point is checked, every single email is
verified. Manually. By a human.
1. https://www.getcyberleads.com/ https://www.getcyberleads.com/
Edit: added quotes.
- balls187 6y agoI'm curious what law do you think is being violated (I'm in the US?)
- thisisbrians 6y agoI'm not an expert, but the FTC definitely regulates how emails can be sent (SPAM laws). I'm not sure if the act of creating a list and selling it without the consent of the emailees is regulated, however.
- baddox 6y agoThe CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t generally prohibit unsolicited marketing emails, but rather it has various restrictions on the behavior and content of those emails. It’s probably less restrictive than most tech-savvy people think. L That said, there is a restriction against sending messages to harvested emails, although I’m not sure how that’s defined or what legal precedents there are regarding that.
- LunaSea 6y agoIn the EU it's against E-Privacy
- gjs278 6y agogood thing nobody cares what the eu thinks
- alexsideris 6y agoHey there, Alex here. I completely understand where you are coming from. I'm not an expert on laws, GDPR, when consent is needed, by whom, etc. This is a side project that just started gaining a little bit of traction, and I'll certainly look into all the above. However, the emails I add are publicly available, found on the internet. Not from some leaked database. I also have prices high in order to keep spammers away and have a small handful of customers. I only have about twenty, and they are targeting different kind of startups.
- strgcmc 6y agoA small suggestion then: why not re-apply the same fundamental technologies and techniques, but to targeting public figures who are perhaps deserving of a little more scrutiny and contact than they're getting? Rather than facilitating cold-calls to startup founders/leaders (which, let's face it, is generally a waste of their time and which they probably don't deserve that kind of punishment), why not expose the emails/contact-info of executives for bad actors in the marketplace, companies that have recently been sued or charged with crimes or civil complaints (by the SEC/FCC/etc.), companies that have had exposes written about them, etc.? I'm not saying this will be a more profitable service or anything btw; in fact I'm quite certain it will have much less profit opportunity. But maybe this is something you can do to buy back some goodwill, to counterbalance the profit-seeking and cold-call/spam enabling side of this project.
- AQuantized 6y agoAre you basically advocating facilitating the spamming of a certain section of "morally bad" individuals? I'm not sure this is the kind of advice that will lead to a less controversial business.
- Magnets 6y agoWork email addresses are considered personal data under GDPR https://www.cognitivelaw.co.uk/gdpr-issues-do-work-emails-count-as-personal-data/ https://www.cognitivelaw.co.uk/gdpr-issues-do-work-emails-co...
- bigtones 6y agoThere are many many companies that sell email addresses and phone numbers and even cell numbers of executives - it's a huge business. Google "B2B contact database" for a list but DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo and UpLead come to mind.
- beervirus 6y ago"lots of people do it" != "it's ok"
- artificial 6y agoTrue. Copyright infringement is done on a massive global scale by search engines and everyone uses those.
- beervirus 6y agoIs indexing content and providing search results actually considered copyright infringement in any jurisdiction?
- beardedscotsman 6y agoYes, look at Google publishing news snippets in France
- lonelappde 6y agoOn a scale of unicorn to Nazi, helping businesses connect with each other is pretty far from Nazi. Im pretty sure almost every one on Cyberlead's list sends annoying "drip campaign" emails.
- beervirus 6y ago“At least I’m not as bad as the Nazis” could justify some pretty unacceptable things.
- anitil 6y ago
- MattGaiser 6y agoYou must now create a $75 a month service for people like yourself who want to know when an email of theirs has been burned. Use his list to sell yours.
- thisisbrians 6y agoYo, I would pay for that. </s>
- NotSammyHagar 6y agoMy list of list of list inclusion trumps your second order list. I use my work emails sometimes for conference registrations, those always get burned and I get spam mail immediately. Conf registrations are the worst.
- thisisbrians 6y agoIf you use Google Mail (and the email field in the form lets you) you can do <youremail>+<whatever tag you want>@gmail.com to track stuff like this.
- Spooky23 6y agoSpammers aren't dumb -- this gets stripped.
- NullPrefix 6y agoNext logical step would be having <youremail>+<secretKey>@gmail.com as the real email and <justyouremail>@gmail.com as spam box.
- NotSammyHagar 6y agoThat is a great idea. I really want my email hosted some place and that I could write my own "post arrival" simple business logic.
- ivanfon 6y agoThe other project, GitGardener[1] is... not necessarily sketchy, but it's obviously designed to make your Github look "better" than it really is (not that the contribution chart matters for anything, but that seems like what the service is trying to convey). 1: https://www.gitgardener.com/ https://www.gitgardener.com/
- qu4ku 6y agoI'm not gonna lie. From the perspective of somebody that commits every day with purpose, this is even more scammy then selling email spam-list. This invalidates my hard work.
- gjs278 6y agoyour hard work should be finished products not npm module spam of the next left-pad
- NullPrefix 6y agoThey should add a feature that releases daily
- wazanator 6y agoMy thoughts exactly, if you're holding yourself to commit every single day your commits are probably not meaningful or are so broken up that reading your repos history is a nightmare. Just because you can commit every day means absolutely nothing if the commits are garbage.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoHopefully you have more to show for your hard work than some green squares on your github profile that nobody really cares about.
- mbrameld 6y agoIt only invalidates your hard work if the purpose of your work is to populate your GitHub commit history.
- rsweeney21 6y agoThere are hundreds of companies, many of them quite large, that do this. ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, Hoovers, Data.com, Clearbit, UpLead, etc. Like it or not, sending unsolicited email is how millions of sales professionals make a living. Before email it was unsolicited mail, voice mail, or phone calls. Outbound sales is an essential part of the world we live in. Honestly, I'm surprised that this is news to you.
- leephillips 6y agoHe didn’t say it was new to him, he said it was scummy, and he’s right. Spam is a scourge, whether it is in the form of email, phone calls, or people knocking on my door. “Outbound sales” steals people’s time, attention, disk space, and electricity. It may be an unavoidable (certainly not “essential”) part of our world, but the people who do it are making our world worse.
- cosmodisk 6y agoIf you call the local bike shop amd try to sell rocket engines,then yes,it is useless. However,there are plenty of good business matching to be done that way. Not all are bad.
- leephillips 6y agoSorry, they are. They are all bad. The bike shop many not be in the market for rocket engines, but they do use wrenches, and pencils, and valve covers. Imagine their phone rings every five minutes, throughout the work day, with people trying to sell these useful things to the bike shop. It's not any better just because the things are useful. If it's me, I'm not going to buy from a cold caller, ever. I already have suppliers. If I need a new supplier, I'm going to find one. You are making the world worse.
- lonelappde 6y agoI assume that your business doesn't advertise, yes? Since advertising is a scourge that steals time and attention.
- artursapek 6y agoAnd "Git Gardener" is just spamming GitHub to make yourself look busy. I detect a pattern here.
- axguscbklp 6y agoI wonder how many people in this thread are upset by Cyberleads selling people's emails and GitGardener making people's Githubs look better... but at the same time commit piracy all the time and make all sorts of excuses for it.
- goatherders 6y ago"Most" or at least "many." I marvel at the sanctimony around here when it comes to SPAM, particularly because I am 100% certain that if a person works for a company with at least one salesperson then unsolicited outreach is a tactic that is helping pay their salary.
- seph-reed 6y agoScummy is a cheap shot that everyone agreed not to do, but one selfish prick decided they deserved it and now our collective trust for each-other is diminished. If you pirate something like indie games, music, films... that's pretty blatantly scummy. Otherwise, go ahead and argue that pirating is lazy, unethical, selfish, etc.... but it's definitely not "scummy."
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoWow, I wonder if we made it on the list after we recently closed a 50M round.
- sokoloff 6y agoFor 0.0001% of the round amount, I suppose you could find out...
- lonelappde 6y agoIndentation is for short monospace code snippets, not blockquotes. HN cannot render blockquotes, it breaks the page layout.
- OrgNet 6y agoTo his defense, a lot of the executives on his list probably buy similar lists to spam a lot more people (endpoint users).
- bishalb 6y agoAs if the email addresses weren't already publicly available on one web page or the other.