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Comment by ojnabieoot | Hacker News Reader

If the email came over an Azure customer support system, or even to the corporate email used to sign up for the Azure account, then sure - I would personally find this very obnoxious and it being buried in the license agreement is suspicious, but not really that unethical. Crucially, this arrangement means Canonical could engage in marketing without MSFT sharing much personal data about Azure users.

What's extremely unethical is contacting the person over LinkedIn. It's extremely aggressive and a huge violation of boundaries, and proves that Microsoft is sharing personal information (names of users) with Canonical.

If I buy something online from a store, I would expect a few spam emails. But it would be completely unacceptable if a sales representative showed up at my house (despite me only sharing my address for billing/shipping purposes). This is basically what happened to the Azure customer.

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> What's extremely unethical is contacting the person over LinkedIn.

Umm the point of linkedin is to make professional contacts and a professional network.

> But it would be completely unacceptable if a sales representative showed up at my house (despite me only sharing my address for billing/shipping purposes). This is basically what happened to the Azure customer.

This would be like the sales rep turning up at your office during office hours and leaving a card for you.

The person used a corporate account and the person was contacted via a method used to contact people about professional matters.

LinkedIn? The also-Microsoft-owned service where you can pay to send DMs to users?

I have no idea what you're talking about regarding "huge violation of boundaries", because there are none on LinkedIn. I get multiple DMs a week from folks I don't know selling something.

I don't even use Azure or LinkedIn. But I'm extremely not interested in continuing a conversation with someone who is being deliberately ignorant and difficult. If your attitude is "consumers are not allowed to complain about any shitty marketing practice if I don't like the company involved" then congratulations, you are sooooo superior.

I dunno man. I'm struggling to see how this is catching anyone by surprise.

I'm not endorsing more ad spam, but I'm really caught off guard that using a service with a real name/email and getting added to a CRM is generating this level of indignation.

Do none of you guys work in corporate? I get Linkedin/email/phone spam all the time. This isn't new. The only interesting thing here is that the trigger and the response time were so short.

Again, I'm not advocating for more of this or even saying I like it. I'm just saying "why are we all of a sudden upset about this?"

I'm on board with the above poster, and you dismissing what they're saying as "deliberately ignorant" because it doesn't jive with your world view is a sad tactic to use when discussing something.

As somebody who's listed products on the AWS marketplace, when you "subscribe" to a product you give them your information as due course. This is obvious, spelled out, and known across all the marketplaces. So I'll assume the part you take issue is, is with reaching out to the individual on LinkedIn instead of through Azure. I don't understand how in a world where companies cold call you after buying your phone number, and spam you with emails after you try to unsubscribe, suddenly messaging you on LinkedIn is over the line.

It's strange, and I'm glad they're moving away from the practice, but to pretend it's this big privacy fiasco is disingenuous at best. They (Canonical) still have all your data, they're just being more subtle about it now. How is that better?

This is the first time I've heard about subscribing being a privacy violation, so no, this is not "obvious."

This isn't a big hard to read document: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/marketplace-...

3a spells out what you're agreeing to share with the publisher of the product in the marketplace when you subscribe to it.

Additionally the listings each link to their respective privacy policy right underneath the subscribe button, plainly in view above the fold.

Finally, I've just attempted to subscribe to "Ubuntu Server" in the Azure Marketplace to see what it looks like, and it shows you a form with the information it's going to share with Ubuntu on the screen for you to modify before subscribing! So it seems like you arguing this isn't "obvious" is in bad faith, because it's obvious for any reasonable person who's actually used the marketplace.

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