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Uber CEO Plays with Fire

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#441

Post by gogopuppygogo »

karlkatzke wrote: post #313
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here. I am an unroll.me user, but had no idea they sell user data to companies this way. Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..

I worked for a company that nearly acquired unroll.me. At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets. A large part of Slice buying unroll.me was for access to those email archives. Specifically, they wanted to look for keyword trends and for receip…

Thanks for the heads up. If anyone else wants to delete their account you can follow these instructions: https://unrollme.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200165526-How...

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#442

Post by gogopuppygogo »

kkyryl wrote: post #437
kkyryl wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

situations like this is what makes it really hard for others in this space to survive. I run https://clean.email (and we don't store/retain/sell any data, just charge people to use it) and the biggest issue we have is lack of trust because of news like this. although every day someone would still email with a question "why you are not free like unroll.me".. sigh.

it's kinda funny how ~50 people who came from this thread to our service illustrated the point of the lack trust – not a single person registered :)

I clicked, I read your value prop, I just can't see myself paying $95+ /year for less obnoxious email in my inbox. It's really not that big of a problem to me.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#443

Post by kkyryl »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #439
kkyryl wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's kinda funny how ~50 people who came from this thread to our service illustrated the point of the lack trust – not a single person registered :)

I don't see how that indicates a lack of trust. People may not be in the mood to change, or need to do more research before they do, especially since it is very late in the evening for the Western world. Also, it's only been 30 minutes since your first post, and 50 is a small sample size.

that's just a joke – I was not really hoping to get users from here :) I was actually surprised with 50 even clicking the link.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#444

Post by gogopuppygogo »

Tanegashima wrote: post #433
rubicon33 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a phrase which I live by - If it's free, you're the product.

Well, this site is free...what's the catch?

We come for startup and tech news. YC is a startup and tech funding company that needs to have it's portfolio reach us as their customers/employees/investors/etc...

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#445

Post by rubicon33 »

qzervaas wrote: post #432
rubicon33 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a phrase which I live by - If it's free, you're the product.

That's all well and good - and many people realise and accept this - but the degree to which you're the product can clearly vary wildly. That's the real issue.

Of course it varies. It's up to you to decide/deduce/infer what the "cost" of using a free service likely is. Understanding that there IS a cost is really the first step, one which a good portion of the population seems to not understand.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#446

Post by ktta »

nilkn wrote: post #424
taude wrote: post #18

I really hope Lyft doesn't do anything to screw up, as I've uninstalled Uber and will probably never use the service again. However, I don't see myself going back to regular taxi system as that's even more corrupt and despicable. I just hope Lyft plays the game with a social conscious and makes positive decisions and continues to treat drivers well (most Lyft drivers I talk to say they like driving for Lyft way bette…

Lyft desperately needs to expand the list of cities they serve. I'm in Houston, the fourth largest city in the US, and for several years Uber has operated here but Lyft still doesn't.

In a way large cities are harder to get into so the qualifier of it being large is actually detrimental. My opinion is that smaller cities are easier to tackle, so in case anything goes wrong, they can be corrected easily, and after a couple mistakes and lessons, they'll be ready for the big boys.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#447

Post by kkyryl »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #442
kkyryl wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's kinda funny how ~50 people who came from this thread to our service illustrated the point of the lack trust – not a single person registered :)

I clicked, I read your value prop, I just can't see myself paying $95+ /year for less obnoxious email in my inbox. It's really not that big of a problem to me.

ugh. I have "Yearly pricing to the homepage" sitting in my to-do list for a few weeks :) so – there's yearly pricing (and it starts with 14.99 / year (I know, this looks really weird, but it took us some time to get to this pricing).

now, whether it's valuable enough to justify the price – depends a lot on how you use your email. we've got users managing 3-5 accounts with hundreds of thousands of emails each and they use our labeling/organization more than removal. think of it as of a way to act upon a group of emails no matter what the size of the group is.

(and I kinda think our website is not really good at communicating this – our traffic is mostly coming from android app right now and we've been putting website work off. who knew!).

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#448

Post by ianwalter »

kkyryl wrote: post #437
kkyryl wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

situations like this is what makes it really hard for others in this space to survive. I run https://clean.email (and we don't store/retain/sell any data, just charge people to use it) and the biggest issue we have is lack of trust because of news like this. although every day someone would still email with a question "why you are not free like unroll.me".. sigh.

it's kinda funny how ~50 people who came from this thread to our service illustrated the point of the lack trust – not a single person registered :)

Yea I'm certainly not eager to sign up for another service like this after finding out that the last one I used sold my data. It's getting really tough to trust third party services with your data these days.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#449

Post by ianwalter »

rubicon33 wrote: post #445
qzervaas wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good - and many people realise and accept this - but the degree to which you're the product can clearly vary wildly. That's the real issue.

Of course it varies. It's up to you to decide/deduce/infer what the "cost" of using a free service likely is. Understanding that there IS a cost is really the first step, one which a good portion of the population seems to not understand.

To be fair Unroll.me shows you ads in their emails to you so a user may think thats how they monetise and be ok with that. Its another thing altogether when the company sells all of your email data directly to buyers.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#450

Post by kkyryl »

ianwalter wrote: post #448
kkyryl wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's kinda funny how ~50 people who came from this thread to our service illustrated the point of the lack trust – not a single person registered :)

Yea I'm certainly not eager to sign up for another service like this after finding out that the last one I used sold my data. It's getting really tough to trust third party services with your data these days.

my point exactly. I was just discussing this with a friend – there's really no way for us to prove that we don't keep or don't sell the data we get access to (aside from clearer tos/policies).

and it's even scarier with iCloud for example – they don't have oAuth and people need to enter their passwords to scan/clean. (they do have "app-specific" passwords though but looks like people have hard time figuring those out.)

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