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Comment by linuxasheviller | Hacker News Reader

I work at one of the large tech companies listed on the site. I've literally never heard of this project until I found it on HN today.

It's funny to me, because just yesterday I was a having a conversation with a colleague who asked me if we had a "corporate account" with another commons SaaS PM tool that he has been using with his team. I think he was in shock when I listed all of the project management and collaboration tools that that I've seen used in our organization. There are no "standard" project management, planning, organization, sharing, etc. tools at big companies. There might be "official" ones, but then managers and directors just buy whatever the hell SaaS they want on a credit card.

Shadow IT is a thing. No company avoids it. I'd assume most Global 2000 companies use just about every single popular tool you can imagine _somewhere_ within their organization.

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I was just about to start an ask hn on this topic. I’m surprised big tech or anyone allows the use of logo and names in this manner but obviously it’s very common to do this. It seems highly unethical to use the name of a company and imply endorsement of that company when all that’s happened is someone from that domain has registered. As many of you have, I have been through the formal PR battles with big tech to do press releases — and even simple things like including their logo in a PowerPoint. I’d be surprised all of these logos agreed to a de facto endorsement with a company that doesn’t even have an about us on its website. So I guess the question is - what are the rules here? Do these companies actually endorse this product, did these developers actually get permission?

Ps - separate topic but I have a hard time signing up for anything without knowing who the underlying owners or the company are and who the company is - legal entity, investors, headquarters location... never mind I could use a throwaway email address and password to register, what’s the point of putting my working documents on a service that can’t establish basic trust. Talk about rogue IT... what does it say about the organizations on their website that individuals used their company email address and possibly the same credentials that they use to login to their IT department? Never mind placing of potentially confidential information on an unknown SaaS?

I can guess with almost certainty that this product does not have permission to use our logo. If they had permission, our brand team would have probably made sure they were using the correct one, instead of a version that was sunset almost a year ago.

Very much this! I have a small business and my product has a lot of "big name" users, but consistently it's pretty much impossible to get sign-off to use their name or logo.

I don't know what the legality of just putting them up there whether they want to or not is, but obviously the social proof of doing so is huge.

How do people navigate this?

Excellent questions indeed. I started an Ask HN in case anyone wants to comment there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22004803

Reply on news.ycombinator.com