Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

If all they sold was a count and a percentage, that would be pretty benign. But what are the odds?

Their privacy policy lets them sell individual messages as long as they're scrubbed of "personal information." Where their bar is for that is anyone's guess.

If all they wanted to do was collect and sell aggregate data, you'd think they would say so, and would have reiterated it in their "apology." If they actually gave a shit about their users' personal data, they'd make sure their privacy policy was as restrictive (for the company) as possible while still permitting them to operate.

View on HN

Slice sells aggregated order data for categories of goods by brand, calculated by looking at email receipts. Things that are useful for calculating overall demand, seasonality, market share, etc. I don't know about selling the actual email content; would be surprised if they did. (Not affiliated with Slice, but am an occasional data buyer, which is how I know of them.)

From their privacy policy:

"We collect such commercial transactional messages so that we can better understand the behavior of the senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may disclose, distribute, transfer, and sell such messages...." [emphasis mine]

Of course they might not sell your messages, but it's pretty weird that they'd put up a "we totally can sell your vaguely anonymized messages" and then not take advantage of it. What they sell to Uber may not be what they make available to you.

Even if they don't currently, they could start doing so at any time. And even if you somehow trusted them not to, they could get bought out by someone not so trustworthy.

They could be, no disagreement there.

Now I'm curious: what is the commercial value in the aggregated email content that would make someone want to pay for it, besides the purchase and receipt data that Slice is already providing (plus subscription and open rates)?

Lyft receipts provide origin and destination addresses as well as the exact date and time. That would be tremendously valuable for Uber. That info could be aggregated and then sold to Uber, or their privacy policy would also allow them to just scrub these e-mails (and the manner of scrubbing is not specified, so who knows if they consider the exact origin and destination locations to be personal information or not) and sell them to Uber directly.

Makes sense. The clickstream data that ISPs are now free to sell would be a goldmine then.

Totally! It'll be a golden age for targeted advertising. Maybe less so for the targets of advertising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com