41–44 of 44 posts
The plumber just needs to trademark his business and then it's a simple case of trademark infringement, no?
HelpHive (the directory) is absolutely in the wrong here. Their business model is unethical at best; it's on par with spamming and link-farming. It doesn't surprise me in the least that the founder of HelpHive is a former RealNetworks employee.
When I was at Rent.com we implemented a very similar telephone system around the time that we were acquired by eBay. The critical difference was that the apartments on our site all had contracts with us and were all paying us per person actually placed in the building. Our initial implementation also didn't have an opt-out, but we had to implement that fairly quickly because of very similar issues with automated answering systems.
The main reasons that we implemented the system were to improve collection rates on our invoices, and improve the rate at which leases go reported to us. (It is amazing how many apartment building owners wanted to cheat us...)
I'm curious whether people's outrage at this technology would extend to that implementation by a different company with a much more clearly established business relationship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It seems that this would have been the ethical thing to do, and would have resulted in some good publicity for them." HelpHive doesn't seem so big on on the whole "ethical thing".
Yeah, but regardless of ethics it seems like an incredibly small price to pay to avoid negative publicity and a possible lawsuit.
Instead, they demonize this guy and selectively address his complaints. It seems they really can't grasp they idea that not everyone agrees with their sense of what's good and right. And that makes me think issues of ethics never crossed their minds; it looks as though they cannot imagine themselves as being wrong.
HelpHive (the directory) is absolutely in the wrong here. Their business model is unethical at best; it's on par with spamming and link-farming. It doesn't surprise me in the least that the founder of HelpHive is a former RealNetworks employee.
Is it the technology or the business you are unhappy with? When I was at Rent.com we implemented a very similar telephone system around the time that we were acquired by eBay. The critical difference was that the apartments on our site all had contracts with us and were all paying us per person actually placed in the building. Our initial implementation also didn't have an opt-out, but we had to implement that fairly…
The tech is fine. The idea of involving people without their consent is what's wrong.
It makes sense as a way to ensure tracking of referrals, but all parties need to be in agreement on it, and users need to be told that they are going through an intermediary.