Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?

#41

Post by MatthewWilkes » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 12:48 AM UTC

parandroid wrote: post #35

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, even if you've managed to buy emails it's of no use, you aren't allowed to contact people unless you've had a business relationship for a related product in the last 12 months.

This is new to me. How does this exactly work? Can you report the email senders to someone, if you get spam or something?

You have to sue them yourself, in small claims court.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/22/m...

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/30/m...

Judges range in how they feel about these complaints, generally you won't be able to claim just for the time they've wasted, you'll have to justify why you have suffered damages. Extreme cases are different, if they're truly wasting huge amounts of your time, but the occasional email is unlikely to be enough for wasted time.

Alternatively, you can get the ICO to tell them off even if you haven't suffered any damages, but that's not always easy…

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?

#42

Post by atinoda-kestrel » Thu, Jul 09, 2015, 11:25 PM UTC

kinkora wrote: post #40

atinoda-kestrel wrote: post #15

A long time ago I ran a file hosting service that almost exclusively served one particular "fringe" community (for some reason it got really popular on one site and spread from there). I was running it anonymously at the time (for both me and for the users), and logging was minimal... ... so imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail (at the abuse@ address, no less) offering to buy uploader/downloader info (IPs, f…

I might be a lil late reading this but I have a slightly off tangential question if you could have time to indulge me in. 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to? 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc..

> 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to?

Handling abuse complaints, wrangling bandwidth spikes, etc. ended up taking way more time than I wanted to give to it. This was before a lot of the modern easily-scalable hosting services were around, so it's not like I could just automagically spin up new instances.

So basically, I ran out of time in my day, and since I already had a good day job I figured "fuck it" and sold out.

I maaaaaybe could've gone full time with it, but it would have been really hard and I would have been competing against some already well-established players. I didn't have much presence outside a particular community, and growing it into a general-purpose thing would've probably killed the "one of us" karma that let me get popular in the first place... so... yeah, not a good plan.

> 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc..

Sold. The party that bought it promptly ran it into the ground in a rather impressively stupid series of decisions, and it was gone within a year. Oh well. Not my problem. I got a decent payout, which -- being younger and stupid -- I promptly blew. So basically in the end all I got was a year or two of really fun living. :)

I'm actually OK with that. It didn't start as more than just a way to serve a specific community's needs, it blew up in popularity and as a result I got some cool experience and some spending money out of it. Seems like a successful project in retrospect.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been contacted to sell your user's information?

#43

Post by kqr » Sun, Jul 12, 2015, 1:59 PM UTC

atinoda-kestrel wrote: post #42

kinkora wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be a lil late reading this but I have a slightly off tangential question if you could have time to indulge me in. 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to? 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc..

> 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to? Handling abuse complaints, wrangling bandwidth spikes, etc. ended up taking way more time than I wanted to give to it. This was before a lot of the modern easily-scalable hosting services were around, so it's not like I could just automagically spin up new instances. So basically, I ran out of time in my day, and since I already had a good da…

About 1: all of your experiences still hold today. A friend of mine started a file hosting business on the side when he was still in elementary school. Much like yours, it quickly became popular in one small community, and then spread out of that. Today, 8 or so years later, he has quit to work full time on it and he works on it... a lot.

"Easily scalable" only works to a point, then it quickly becomes expensive unless you create a solution tailored specifically for your problems, at which point you're negating the "easily" part again.