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“I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

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Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#223

I'm super confused as to why anybody thinks this is a problem. Generally, when one "buys" something from a "marketplace" the vendor gets to know who the buyer is. That the vendor asks the buyer if there's anything else they'd want to buy is par for the course.

Imagine you rented a car from Hertz on a work trip with a company card, and then Ford called your house.

Actually, if that happened, most people would be slightly annoyed, but not at the "wtf" level of this Tweet. Simply because it's a digital purchase, and it's "ye olde evil Microsoft", it's considered a "wtf" moment.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? When I buy something at a brick and mortar store, I don't expect the product's manufacturer to get my personal information. I don't even expect the store to get my personal information if I pay in cash. I don't want some "relationship" with a company just because I buy their product.

Sure, but you did notice that they had a mailing list and gave them your name and email address and a bit more information so they could get back to you. This thread explains it in more detail: https://twitter.com/dezren39/status/1359726235929223168 Seems pretty simple. No real story, other than the OP not paying attention.

"Why won't it read?!"

That southpark episode, while disturbing, amusingly is spot on.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Canonical? Isn't this a Microsoft feature?

Yes the fact that Microsoft shares this information is concerning. But Microsoft only provides the information to Canonical (according to the ToS) for technical assistance and product support, but not for Marketing purposes. Canonical is the one who violates trust here. Because they are using this information for marketing purposes, which they are not allowed to do under the information sharing agreement that they ha…

You're obviously correct in the de jure sense, here. But there is also a matter of relationship expectation.

An unstated assumption of using any "free" product is that it's not actually free. Canonical screwed up, to be sure, but I do think many of us just expect getting harassed by salespeople to be the cost of using a "free" product.

Microsoft, on the other hand, charges me by the hour for using Azure. They've taken their pound of flesh, so my business expectation is that I'm going to be left the hell alone for anything other than billing matters. Them sharing the data in the first place, for something I've paid money for, FEELS like the bigger violation to me.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#226
post #40

As someone who works in tech sales - the real bullshit here is that this is some right-out-of-college 22 y/o entry level sales person (SDR) who was likely told to to take this list and message everyone on linkedin 1x1. The negative impact of this goes on his shoulders where the positive responses from this get passed off to someone else who is outside the blast radius. Stuff like this is the norm when sales is viewed…

This reminds of of a 2019 paper on "moral crumple zones"[1] which talks about how the human component of automated systems are increasingly there to act as the focus for moral failures. Did your giant automated system do something bad? Blame the one human who was assigned to somehow stop that from happening, no matter how impossible that might be. [1] https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

Also see Normal Accidents[1] which discusses "human error" as a PR cover for systems that are simply too complicated for unaided humans to monitor and understand.

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192408.Normal_Accidents

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#228
post #43

This is incredibly common. I installed an analytics package on my personal heroku account for a side project and received an email on my enterprise email account from their sales department. My personal heroku account uses my personal email address, eg. jbob@gmail.com, but my enterprise account uses my full name, eg. jonathan.bob@bigco.com. There's a sneaky CRM tool floating around that is connecting the dots on peop…

This is called data enrichment. It is a massive industry with boatloads of companies serving it. One of the more well known (outside of the credit bureaus) is Acxiom. Googling will get you pretty far.

If you have money and a piece of personal info (just about any combo of name+zip, phone#, email addrs, credit card, tracking cookie, etc), these companies can quickly give you full personal details including income and housing history, mortgage status, email addresses used, employment history and full details on your employers, plus all these details on spouses and children, pretty much whatever you want. It's remarkable.

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