Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Unroll.me Co-Founder Responds To Criticism The Company Sold User Info To Uber

From Digg:
Over the weekend, a startup called Unroll.me faced backlash from customers over the revelation that it sold anonymized data from their inboxes to Uber. 
Update: On Tuesday, Unroll.me's co-founder, who no longer has a role or ownership stake in the company, added fuel to the fire by writing what people on Twitter are already calling "the worst possible take" on the Unroll.me debacle. 
"Data is pretty much the only business model for email and Unroll.me is not the only company that looks at, collects and sells your data. What exactly do you think is going on in your FREE gmail inbox? And honestly, anonymized and at scale why do people care? Do you really care? Are you really surprised? How exactly is this shocking? 
Or maybe you just hate yourselves because you think Uber is gross but you use them anyway and "why are these tech founders such assholes" that they have to ruin your experience where you need to delete your apps? And you love Unroll.me and you feel righteous and you have to delete that now too because you need to take a stand against these plain-as-da-in-the-terms-of -service practices. 
Look, respectfully, you have clearly been living under a rock because if you look at the entire tech ecosystem — It’s fucking gross."
There are plenty more typos and aggressively sarcastic rhetorical questions in Chase's defense of Unroll.me, which is really worth reading in full.
[Medium]
Here's some background on Unroll.me, how its data collection practices came to light, and why no one is satisfied by its CEO's attempt to explain the mess....MUCH MORE