I have received over the years so much spam of this kind by multiple YC-funded companies that I now reflexively send to spam any email that mentions being YC-funded, regardless of how legitimate the email is.
Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#12I was also spammed (twice) by voice.ai. You mention GDPR, which also "applies" to me, though I wonder if what they're doing is actually illegal. I mean, after all, I'm putting my email on GitHub precisely to give people a way to contact me. Of course, I do that naïvely, assuming good faith, not expecting _companies_ to use it to spam me. So definitely what they're doing is, at the very least, in poor taste.
Is there any company that will take my money to solve GDPR issues? And by solve I mean sue the spammers? For last few years I saw they "try" to look legit, by claiming addresses are managed by some Hungarian/Spanish shell company, hoping no one will be able to afford pursuing infractions over borders.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#13I have been having the same experience. If you starred a GitHub repo, and they think that their product is similar, they will send you their spam. I condemn this! They should be ashamed!
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#14I was also spammed (twice) by voice.ai. You mention GDPR, which also "applies" to me, though I wonder if what they're doing is actually illegal. I mean, after all, I'm putting my email on GitHub precisely to give people a way to contact me. Of course, I do that naïvely, assuming good faith, not expecting _companies_ to use it to spam me. So definitely what they're doing is, at the very least, in poor taste.
Is there any company that will take my money to solve GDPR issues? And by solve I mean sue the spammers? For last few years I saw they "try" to look legit, by claiming addresses are managed by some Hungarian/Spanish shell company, hoping no one will be able to afford pursuing infractions over borders.
> Is there any company that will take my money to solve GDPR issues? And by solve I mean sue the spammers?
A lawyer
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#15I usually check the "Received" header and report to the email service provider. Once in a while I receive a response saying the case is properly handled.
These providers are the only ones that care about their reputation and thus may take some action. Investors? Nope.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#16I have received over the years so much spam of this kind by multiple YC-funded companies that I now reflexively send to spam any email that mentions being YC-funded, regardless of how legitimate the email is.
I don't blame you, the FOMO is real to the point even basic ChatGPT wrappers are getting funded these days, I guess.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#17> These emails indicate that those companies scrape people's Github activity, and if they notice users contributing to repos in their field of business, send marketing emails to those users without receiving their consent. My guess is that they use commit metadata for this purpose. There are likely marketing email datasets floating around the internet that contain email addresses scraped from commit metadata. I use a…
May not necessarily be from commit messages, there's at least one way simpler way: simply adding .gpg to the end of any user URL will return that user's public GPG key.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#18This happens all the time, not really surprised as the GitHub API makes it pretty easy to extract valuable leads with real and confirmed email addresses.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#19Email address privacy is a feature offered by Github and replaces your day to day email: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email...
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#20I was also spammed (twice) by voice.ai. You mention GDPR, which also "applies" to me, though I wonder if what they're doing is actually illegal. I mean, after all, I'm putting my email on GitHub precisely to give people a way to contact me. Of course, I do that naïvely, assuming good faith, not expecting _companies_ to use it to spam me. So definitely what they're doing is, at the very least, in poor taste.
Is there any company that will take my money to solve GDPR issues? And by solve I mean sue the spammers? For last few years I saw they "try" to look legit, by claiming addresses are managed by some Hungarian/Spanish shell company, hoping no one will be able to afford pursuing infractions over borders.
There's probably a law against it, but I've always thought a legal company could make decent money taking cases like this in bulk for free, on the condition that they get to keep all the compensation, while the "client" still gets the satisfaction of punishing the offending party.