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Unroll.me

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Re: Unroll.me

#41

Post by noja »

gdulli wrote: post #40
noja wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can be annoyed with yourself for not reading it. Do how do you spend reading every click-wrap agreement you accept? We condition users not to read these things, so we can't be surprised when they don't read them.

> Do how do you spend reading every click-wrap agreement you accept? No, but I don't complain about the consequences. If I agreed to terms that gave my house to unroll.me, they'd never be able to enforce it because it's egregiously inappropriate. I take that much for granted. The actual unroll.me terms are not egregiously inappropriate. They may be distasteful to most people here, but it's not offensive or inappropri…

So "do as I say, not as I do"

Re: Unroll.me

#42

Post by gdulli »

mikeash wrote: post #26
gdulli wrote: post #18

> operating under the radar The privacy policy is clear and easy to find and understand. You can be annoyed with yourself for not reading it. You can decide the service isn't worth the tradeoffs. You can be annoyed with yourself for being naive about how free products work. But it's illogical and disingenuous to call this "under the radar" or blame the service for your own surprise about how it works. We have free wi…

Few people read privacy policies. Everybody knows this. The people making this product know this. If the only place they explain it is in the privacy policy, then they are knowingly and intentionally putting it in a place where most of their users will not see it.

> Few people read privacy policies.

People have free will and that's their choice. I'm not surprised that most don't. I rarely do. But it doesn't make sense that the people who have strong feelings about privacy aren't reading them. You can't give up what's clearly your own personal responsibility and then blame someone else for the consequences.

Re: Unroll.me

#43

Post by gdulli »

noja wrote: post #41
gdulli wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do how do you spend reading every click-wrap agreement you accept? No, but I don't complain about the consequences. If I agreed to terms that gave my house to unroll.me, they'd never be able to enforce it because it's egregiously inappropriate. I take that much for granted. The actual unroll.me terms are not egregiously inappropriate. They may be distasteful to most people here, but it's not offensive or inappropri…

So "do as I say, not as I do"

That does not apply here. That's obtuse. It would be hypocritical for me to criticize not reading terms and then complaining about those terms if I was doing both those things. Everyone's free to do as I say and do, accept terms and then accept their consequences.

Re: Unroll.me

#44

Post by Kiro »

jonheller wrote: post #17

This may sound silly, but I consider any application that requests full read access to my Gmail account to be akin to asking for my social security number. I remember when the big wave of smart email apps first came out a few years ago, and the horror was the expressed here when it was revealed that these apps basically route all of your email through their servers in order to do processing on it. Sadly at lot of the…

> akin to asking for my social security number

In many countries this is public information. Why is it sacred in the US? What can you do with it?

Re: Unroll.me

#45

Post by gdulli »

edw wrote: post #30
nhangen wrote: post #4

I don't find the practice ethical at all, but that said, don't understand why anyone would be surprised by this. Users are almost always the product. Seems like the Gruber version of outrage porn.

I disagree. If think it's the false sadness — er, "heartbreak" — expressed by the CEO in response to users being upset that angers Gruber. It's one thing to be a straight up sociopath and run your sociopathic business but quite another to pretend you care one iota about the people who you are monetizing by turning them into a personal data slurry. By the way, folks seem to be intent on down voting your comment into o…

> That, sadly, seems like increasingly typical behavior here, and elsewhere on the internet.

"I'll call someone I've never met a lying sociopath but I draw the line at downvotes!"

Re: Unroll.me

#46

Post by mikeash »

gdulli wrote: post #42
mikeash wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few people read privacy policies. Everybody knows this. The people making this product know this. If the only place they explain it is in the privacy policy, then they are knowingly and intentionally putting it in a place where most of their users will not see it.

> Few people read privacy policies. People have free will and that's their choice. I'm not surprised that most don't. I rarely do. But it doesn't make sense that the people who have strong feelings about privacy aren't reading them. You can't give up what's clearly your own personal responsibility and then blame someone else for the consequences.

I agree that blame should go to people who care about privacy and then don't read privacy policies.

However, blame should also go to companies that hide important privacy info in privacy policies, with the full knowledge that most of their users will never see it.

Given that the company here is a single entity, while their users are a disorganized mass, I think the company should bear much more responsibility for fixing the situation. They can unilaterally fix it for everybody, while their users can't.

The company also exists with the sole purpose of running its business. That is all they do. Their users, on the other hand, are quite busy doing many other things and dedicate perhaps 0.1% of their time to doing business with this company.

In a relationship that's this lopsided, we should not hold both sides to the same standard. The company should bear far more responsibility for hiding important information where nobody will read it than their users should bear for not hunting it down.

Edit: it occurs to me that this is basically like getting conned. Somebody spins a story at a gas station about how they're trying to get to Cincinnati and they just spent their last $5 on money for their sick kid and can you just help a guy out, and they manage to con some poor sucker, do we focus our ire on the con artist or on the sucker? I'm OK with telling the sucker that they should be more careful and they shouldn't have fallen for the story, but they are ultimately the victim here, and the culprit is the scammer.

Re: Unroll.me

#47

Post by yladiz »

timsayshey wrote: post #33

Great, I'm sold on leaving unroll.me but I think there is a deeper problem here. Email is so insecure and if you're already using Gmail then who knows who Google is selling your emails to. Google is just a lot better about keeping it a secret. Fooling yourself into thinking your emails are secure if you're not using Unroll.me is a joke. Also, please suggest a secure alternative when telling people to leave a service…

Although I've since moved on from Gmail, because I don't like Google having access to all of my emails and harvesting the data from them, I do trust Google as far as sanitizing emails much more than a service like Unroll.me.

As far as a different service, I found Unroll.me to be just another annoying email I had to read and found it kinda useless since if I wanted to "roll up" an email, I had to read the daily email to see what it suggests and then add to my rollup list. My solution was to just unsubscribe from any email that I didn't actively read (which was most of them). Especially given that most services are one-click unsubscribe now in the Gmail interface or Mail.app, it's pretty simple compared to a few years ago.

Re: Unroll.me

#48

Post by Oletros »

timsayshey wrote: post #33

Great, I'm sold on leaving unroll.me but I think there is a deeper problem here. Email is so insecure and if you're already using Gmail then who knows who Google is selling your emails to. Google is just a lot better about keeping it a secret. Fooling yourself into thinking your emails are secure if you're not using Unroll.me is a joke. Also, please suggest a secure alternative when telling people to leave a service…

Google has their share of privacy problems, but they don't sell data

Re: Unroll.me

#49

Post by klaustopher »

gdulli wrote: post #18

> operating under the radar The privacy policy is clear and easy to find and understand. You can be annoyed with yourself for not reading it. You can decide the service isn't worth the tradeoffs. You can be annoyed with yourself for being naive about how free products work. But it's illogical and disingenuous to call this "under the radar" or blame the service for your own surprise about how it works. We have free wi…

In Germany there's actually a law[1] (Google Translate[2]) that prohibits companies from putting "suprising" statements into their terms of services.

For example, you cannot put the fact that the user is signing up for a subscription service into the fine print or the terms of services when it is not stated anywhere else on the website. Even if the customer clicks the "yes, I have read the terms and totally agree with everything that's in there"-button.

I think most EU countries have similar rules[3].

  [1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/305c.html
  [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdejure.org%2Fgesetze%2FBGB%2F305c.html
  [3] http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-contract-terms/index_en.htm

Re: Unroll.me

#50

Post by gdulli »

mikeash wrote: post #46
gdulli wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few people read privacy policies. People have free will and that's their choice. I'm not surprised that most don't. I rarely do. But it doesn't make sense that the people who have strong feelings about privacy aren't reading them. You can't give up what's clearly your own personal responsibility and then blame someone else for the consequences.

I agree that blame should go to people who care about privacy and then don't read privacy policies. However, blame should also go to companies that hide important privacy info in privacy policies, with the full knowledge that most of their users will never see it. Given that the company here is a single entity, while their users are a disorganized mass, I think the company should bear much more responsibility for fix…

> Somebody spins a story at a gas station about how they're trying to get to Cincinnati and they just spent their last $5 on money for their sick kid and can you just help a guy out, and they manage to con some poor sucker, do we focus our ire on the con artist or on the sucker?

That is just ridiculous. You're describing a lie. This situation has transparency that people have simply chosen to ignore. Fine print isn't a crime.

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