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Comment by thisisbrians | Hacker News Reader

So, I checked out Cyberleads[1], and...this dude is just literally (and brazenly) selling a list of startup executives' emails without their permission or consent. Not sure if that's even legal, but it's definitely scummy, and I hate when I get cold (and frequently, also technically SPAM) emails like the ones this guys is enabling.

Here's a direct quote from the site[1]:

  Every day, we scour the web and find every single startup that just
  raised money. We collect information about these companies, like
  revenue, size, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, CEO information,
  emails, and much more.

  We then further investigate, and verify manually every entry on the
  list. Every single data point is checked, every single email is
  verified. Manually. By a human.

1. https://www.getcyberleads.com/

Edit: added quotes.

View on HN

You must now create a $75 a month service for people like yourself who want to know when an email of theirs has been burned. Use his list to sell yours.

Yo, I would pay for that.

</s>

My list of list of list inclusion trumps your second order list. I use my work emails sometimes for conference registrations, those always get burned and I get spam mail immediately. Conf registrations are the worst.

If you use Google Mail (and the email field in the form lets you) you can do <youremail>+<whatever tag you want>@gmail.com to track stuff like this.

Spammers aren't dumb -- this gets stripped.

Next logical step would be having <youremail>+<secretKey>@gmail.com as the real email and <justyouremail>@gmail.com as spam box.

That is a great idea. I really want my email hosted some place and that I could write my own "post arrival" simple business logic.

> That is a great idea. I really want my email hosted some place and that I could write my own "post arrival" simple business logic.

You can do this in gmail with filters, unless I'm missing something about the use case.

https://anonaddy.me

I use this service a lot.

Clearly you like them because you use them a lot.

Anything about them you mislike?

Maybe it's too early, but I don't get it. If the spammer doesn't strip "+<secretKey>" then you get spam in your real inbox. Btw, what is so secret about the secretKey if you post it on the internet?

You give different secretKey to each recipient. This way you know who leaked your email.

It works for common spam, but it does not really work for curated lists because they can remove it.

(I think it is also an RFC standard, not just gmail, but don't quote me on this).

Not an RFC standard but it is a "de facto" standard. Everyone implements it, the config line for it is just commented out on postfix, super easy to use.

I’m pretty sure you can insert or strip periods ‘.’ in gmails too

Use temporary email alias? That's what I have been doing.

I use my own domain and have a catch-all. I usually enter the domain name as the identifier. I.e. here it would be news.ycombinator.com@mydomain.test

I sometimes do the same. It's weird to me that some places immediately sell your email and other orgs do not. Like a graph database conference seemed to lead to a lot of new spam.

It’s not some conference, it’s some asshole who has the ability to implement that kind of behaviour. I bet loads of people working at that graph conference didn’t agree but either didn’t know or didn’t have a say in the activity.

I actually think this is a decent idea, so made a quick little landing page to gauge if people are interested. http://unsolicit.me

I can't access the Google form.

Sorry about that, it should be fixed now

Interested, but your price point is way to high. It’s also pretty easy for me to go to each vendor you mention on the landing page and fill out the opt out request form they are mandated to provide.

It is too high if you are paying for it personally. As a company benefit for top execs and managers? $25 isn't so bad given that the alternative solution is an executive assistant.

Even better. Give me a quick one-button "here's a lawsuit against you" as a response for my email being in that list. I'd gladly pay hundreds of dollars to 1) remove the pain and 2) punish a business like this.

Is there a service to make quick little landing pages to gauge if people are interested?

The other project, GitGardener[1] is... not necessarily sketchy, but it's obviously designed to make your Github look "better" than it really is (not that the contribution chart matters for anything, but that seems like what the service is trying to convey).

1: https://www.gitgardener.com/

I'm not gonna lie. From the perspective of somebody that commits every day with purpose, this is even more scammy then selling email spam-list. This invalidates my hard work.

your hard work should be finished products not npm module spam of the next left-pad

They should add a feature that releases daily

My thoughts exactly, if you're holding yourself to commit every single day your commits are probably not meaningful or are so broken up that reading your repos history is a nightmare.

Just because you can commit every day means absolutely nothing if the commits are garbage.

Hopefully you have more to show for your hard work than some green squares on your github profile that nobody really cares about.

It only invalidates your hard work if the purpose of your work is to populate your GitHub commit history.

I had a previous employer that started counting commits. Doesn't matter what you do, if you had to spend you whole day interacting directly with a customer(or even at that customer location trying to figure out some issue), nothing mattered. Only the number of commits. Not even the commit size mattered.

So I started doing tiny commits to counter that.

I would gladly use this thing as a f* you before leaving.

Your story brought to mind this bit of Apple folklore[0], wherein Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw, reported his weekly LOC as -2,000 after implementing optimizations.

[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

That's pretty common, my contribution to my current work is surely in the negative as well due to the massive amount of spaghetti code I had to refactor.

It's pretty gross that someone is trying to monetize this. There's actually FOSS version that draws pixel art in your contribution history: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti It's pretty funny, though it doesn't look like its actively maintained anymore. To quote from one of the issue threads:

What better way to demonstrate that the commit graph is a not an indicator of a profile's importance? Hopefully someone who sees gitifi style art in the graph will immediately realize that they should take it with a grain of salt, and instead read the code.

It's not gross. More power to them if they can find someone who finds it worthwhile to pay them $10/mo for it. Or even $10,000/mo.

You're right, gross is a strong word. I don't mean to bash a dev who is producing something they are passionate about while at the same time providing a service to others.

What I will say is that that over-incentivizing active commit histories leads to weird market solutions like this one. The problem isn't a product that populates your commit history for a fee, the problem is an over reliance on arbitrary GitHub commits as a proxy for developer talent.

What's the benefit?

Is someone getting a interview or a job because they have a trivial useless repo spammed with commits?

I can't imagine anything more suspicious looking than that! I'm guessing the US isn't the target audience here.

Oh good lord, that's just filthy.

But man would it be hilarious to grill someone during an interview about this. "Oh wow! You're coding even on holidays! How about we do a quick look at your commits and you can tell us about your progress on some of these projects?"

I know some people who use g̶i̶t̶ ̶g̶a̶r̶d̶e̶n̶e̶r̶ gitfiti to draw on their commit history. Like NES and Atari sprites, like Pacman or Galaga. It's just meant to be a funny subversion of people who take GitHub graphs a little too seriously.

I've never had someone ask about my GitHub and it's on my resume. Probably because it's fairly inactive and I regularly take down projects I'm not proud of.

There are hundreds of companies, many of them quite large, that do this. ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, Hoovers, Data.com, Clearbit, UpLead, etc.

Like it or not, sending unsolicited email is how millions of sales professionals make a living. Before email it was unsolicited mail, voice mail, or phone calls. Outbound sales is an essential part of the world we live in.

Honestly, I'm surprised that this is news to you.

He didn’t say it was new to him, he said it was scummy, and he’s right. Spam is a scourge, whether it is in the form of email, phone calls, or people knocking on my door. “Outbound sales” steals people’s time, attention, disk space, and electricity. It may be an unavoidable (certainly not “essential”) part of our world, but the people who do it are making our world worse.

If you call the local bike shop amd try to sell rocket engines,then yes,it is useless. However,there are plenty of good business matching to be done that way. Not all are bad.

Sorry, they are. They are all bad. The bike shop many not be in the market for rocket engines, but they do use wrenches, and pencils, and valve covers. Imagine their phone rings every five minutes, throughout the work day, with people trying to sell these useful things to the bike shop. It's not any better just because the things are useful. If it's me, I'm not going to buy from a cold caller, ever. I already have suppliers. If I need a new supplier, I'm going to find one. You are making the world worse.

I assume that your business doesn't advertise, yes? Since advertising is a scourge that steals time and attention.

When I look for the new supplier for my bike shop, if word of mouth doesn't yield one, I'll probably be guided by some form of advertising. Do you really not understand the difference between making information available to interested customers by advertising, and calling people up, annoying 1000 people to get that one sale? Advertising can be a scourge, but it depends on how you do it. There is no way to spam that is not a scourge.

You’ve never reached out to a targeted, relevant industry contact in pursuit of a potentially mutually-beneficial endeavor? If so, have those individuals always anticipated your communication in advance?

There are many many companies that sell email addresses and phone numbers and even cell numbers of executives - it's a huge business. Google "B2B contact database" for a list but DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo and UpLead come to mind.

"lots of people do it" != "it's ok"

True. Copyright infringement is done on a massive global scale by search engines and everyone uses those.

Is indexing content and providing search results actually considered copyright infringement in any jurisdiction?

Yes, look at Google publishing news snippets in France

On a scale of unicorn to Nazi, helping businesses connect with each other is pretty far from Nazi.

Im pretty sure almost every one on Cyberlead's list sends annoying "drip campaign" emails.

“At least I’m not as bad as the Nazis” could justify some pretty unacceptable things.

How do these places get this information in the first place? It seems like it wouldn't be economical to get insiders to do it, and guessing firstname.lastname@company.com seems too unreliable

I'm curious what law do you think is being violated (I'm in the US?)

I'm not an expert, but the FTC definitely regulates how emails can be sent (SPAM laws). I'm not sure if the act of creating a list and selling it without the consent of the emailees is regulated, however.

The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t generally prohibit unsolicited marketing emails, but rather it has various restrictions on the behavior and content of those emails. It’s probably less restrictive than most tech-savvy people think. L

That said, there is a restriction against sending messages to harvested emails, although I’m not sure how that’s defined or what legal precedents there are regarding that.

In the EU it's against E-Privacy

And "Git Gardener" is just spamming GitHub to make yourself look busy. I detect a pattern here.

I wonder how many people in this thread are upset by Cyberleads selling people's emails and GitGardener making people's Githubs look better... but at the same time commit piracy all the time and make all sorts of excuses for it.

"Most" or at least "many." I marvel at the sanctimony around here when it comes to SPAM, particularly because I am 100% certain that if a person works for a company with at least one salesperson then unsolicited outreach is a tactic that is helping pay their salary.

Scummy is a cheap shot that everyone agreed not to do, but one selfish prick decided they deserved it and now our collective trust for each-other is diminished.

If you pirate something like indie games, music, films... that's pretty blatantly scummy.

Otherwise, go ahead and argue that pirating is lazy, unethical, selfish, etc.... but it's definitely not "scummy."

As if the email addresses weren't already publicly available on one web page or the other.

Wow, I wonder if we made it on the list after we recently closed a 50M round.

For 0.0001% of the round amount, I suppose you could find out...

To his defense, a lot of the executives on his list probably buy similar lists to spam a lot more people (endpoint users).

Indentation is for short monospace code snippets, not blockquotes.

HN cannot render blockquotes, it breaks the page layout.

Hey there, Alex here. I completely understand where you are coming from.

I'm not an expert on laws, GDPR, when consent is needed, by whom, etc.

This is a side project that just started gaining a little bit of traction, and I'll certainly look into all the above.

However, the emails I add are publicly available, found on the internet. Not from some leaked database.

I also have prices high in order to keep spammers away and have a small handful of customers. I only have about twenty, and they are targeting different kind of startups.

A small suggestion then: why not re-apply the same fundamental technologies and techniques, but to targeting public figures who are perhaps deserving of a little more scrutiny and contact than they're getting?

Rather than facilitating cold-calls to startup founders/leaders (which, let's face it, is generally a waste of their time and which they probably don't deserve that kind of punishment), why not expose the emails/contact-info of executives for bad actors in the marketplace, companies that have recently been sued or charged with crimes or civil complaints (by the SEC/FCC/etc.), companies that have had exposes written about them, etc.?

I'm not saying this will be a more profitable service or anything btw; in fact I'm quite certain it will have much less profit opportunity. But maybe this is something you can do to buy back some goodwill, to counterbalance the profit-seeking and cold-call/spam enabling side of this project.

Are you basically advocating facilitating the spamming of a certain section of "morally bad" individuals? I'm not sure this is the kind of advice that will lead to a less controversial business.

Work email addresses are considered personal data under GDPR

https://www.cognitivelaw.co.uk/gdpr-issues-do-work-emails-co...

However, b2b marking may be allowed under the GDPR. Form your link:

> Recital 47 of the GDPR states that “The processing of personal data for direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate interest”. However, if you intend to rely on legitimate interest rather than consent, you will need to apply the following three-part test:

> 1. The purpose test: Are you processing personal data in pursuit of a legitimate interest?

> 2. The necessity test: Is the processing proportionate to achieving your aims?

> 3. The balancing test: Is your legitimate interest overridden by the rights of the person whose data you’re processing?

This is the correct answer for B2B emails in Europe.

> I'm not an expert on laws, GDPR, when consent is needed, by whom, etc.

> This is a side project that just started gaining a little bit of traction, and I'll certainly look into all the above.

You are selling a product without even knowing the legality of doing so?

Never heard of ask for forgiveness than for permission?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. If you are, I applaud the subtlety.

For those nodding in agreement, ask yourself whether this line of thinking would hold up in court.

The GP has a point though. You can't operate a hotel without a license (AirBNB), you can't run a taxi business without a license (Uber), you can't keep other people's money like a bank without a license (PayPal). The list goes on...

Isn't this exactly survivorship bias?

Not exactly, but mine was a tongue-in-cheek comment anyway.

Move fast & break things at its best.

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