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Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#31

Post by martinwoodward »

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board.

The fundamental nature of Git makes this pretty easy for folks to scrape data from open source repositories. It's against our terms of service and those folks might want to talk with some lawyers about doing it - but as every Git commit contains your name and email address in the commit data it's not technically difficult even if it is unethical.

From the early days we've added features to help users anonymise their email addresses for commits posted to GitHub. Basically, you configure your local Git client to use your 'no-reply' email address in commits and that still links back to your GitHub account when you push: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...

I think that's still probably the best route. We want to keep open source data as open as possible, so I don't think locking down API's etc is the right route. We do throttle API requests and scraping traffic, but then again there have been plenty of posts here over the years from people annoyed at hitting those limits so it's definitely a balancing act. Love to know what folks here think though.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#33

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Maxious wrote: post #22
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

I’m not especially bothered by this [yet -AI is likely to make this worse]. It’s a fairly insignificant component of my spam catcher. At least, it’s a bit focused. Every day, I get deluged with hundreds of spam and scam emails, often because some knucklehead entered my email in a form (either accidentally, or as a throwaway red herring).

Sure but these YC spammers are identifiable and have much more to lose https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ > Some examples of ethical behavior we expect from founders are: > - Not spamming members of the community > To maintain our community, if we determine (in our sole discretion) that a founder has behaved unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC founder status. This includes access to all Y Combina…

> > - Not spamming members of the community

Ah... but there's the rub.

Define "the community."

Do random GH accounts count as "members of the YC community"?

Sorry, but unsolicited contact, much as I hates, HATESSSS it, is a classic component of any business, and has been, for many decades. I don't think it would be appropriate for a business organization to prohibit its members from engaging in "cold calling," of which, UCE is really an example.

Using the YC branding/name, however, is a different matter.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#34

Post by ayhanfuat »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

I am also getting constant spam because apparently they can see who starred a repo (i.e. I see you starred repo x and we are doing something similar). I am not starring anything anymore.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#35

Post by notpushkin »

pscanf wrote: post #5

I 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.

> I'm putting my email on GitHub precisely to give people a way to contact me.

They’re not only looking at the public email in your profile, they’re also looking at your committer email (git config user.email). You could argue that you’re not putting that out for people to contact you.

(I’ve used that trick a couple times to reach out to people, too, but never mass emailing.)

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#36

Post by notpushkin »

RobotToaster wrote: post #20
zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s pretty much class action lawsuits!

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#37

Post by AznHisoka »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

Maybe I am missing something, but can’t you simply not show the email address in a git commit? (Sincere question, not saying this is trivial. i am dumb and like to ask dumb questions even if might be embarassing)

If someone wants to message someone, it goes through github notifications or github emails them

Also banning an account doesnt seem like a heavy punishment, given they can simply move to gitlab, bitbucket etc

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#38

Post by AznHisoka »

kristoff_it wrote: post #11

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.

Same here, having YC attached to your name is not the flex you think it is, its even the opposite for me

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#39

Post by medi8r »

neya wrote: post #2

This is atleast fine as it's just spam, I got pulled into an actual scam and it never made it to the frontpage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357205

But that is someone pretending to be YC which is sort of less interesting than a YC company doing something bad. Because phishers imitate legit companies all the time. Easy to get roped in and I sympathise, anyone is suseptable (today I almost clicked the phishing training email as it looked urgent and pushed the right buttons)
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