Hmmm.
Thank you for finding that! This opens up a fascinating discussion about ethics.
So, to start from a purely capitalistic viewpoint, it seems like you are free to use your property that you own however you wish, subject to the law. That raises questions like: in this situation, is it legal for the CC numbers to be stored in that way? From the customer’s POV, they authorized HomeJoy to store their CC info, not Fly Maids. But that leads to the question of: those CC numbers are stored somewhere (or the authorization token) and those assets were a part of the sale.
I don’t know. It’s a massive advantage to have your customers in a position of “just click this button to give us money” rather than pestering for CC details.
It’s a little odd, to be sure, but... it seems like unless it’s illegal, it might not be unethical to take advantage of that opportunity. It depends how you feel about capitalism, I suppose. If there was nothing illegal here, which seems perhaps likely, then it seems valid.
From another point of view, it sounds like he was just trying very hard to succeed, and in some sense Fly Maids was the continuation of his previous endeavor. So I sort of understand why it might have felt natural to reach out to the customers you were already doing business with.
But again, all of this has two important assumptions: (a) he legally owned all assets, and (b) used those assets to the letter of the law. If those are mistaken then someone with more experience should definitely call it out.
"When we contacted customers, we didn’t tell them we were Homejoy relaunching because we wanted to gauge reception to our new model without the influence of Homejoy’s brand," Cheung allegedly wrote. "As a result, we scared many customers, who expected the worst had happened to their data. We should have told customers upfront who we were, what we were testing, and used original content."
I dunno. This seems pretty reasonable, honestly. It kind of alarms me that you see this as clearly unethical, because I could see myself making this same mistake, in a different life. If you feel like explaining more of the reasoning regarding the ethics, I’d personally find it interesting to listen.