Unroll.me boss issues a non-apology, says it's in the T&C

Apr 25, 2017 00:04 GMT  ·  By

Unroll.me, a service that scans your emails to help you unsubscribe from all those annoying newsletters you're getting, was caught red-handed selling off data of its users to Uber. Following the reveal, the company apologized for upsetting people when they found out, not for what they were doing. 

"Our users are the heart of our company and service. So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service. And while we try our best to be open about our business model, recent customer feedback tells me we weren't explicit enough," writes Jojo Hedaya, CEO of Unroll.me.

Clearly, he didn't really understand why people were upset. The site has been around since 2011 and has plenty of users. The service goes through your inbox, notices which services and alerts you've signed up for and allows you a quick way to unsubscribe from the things you don't want.

Over the weekend, it was revealed that a few years back Uber was caught infringing on people's privacy by tracking even the people who had deleted their app. Furthermore, the company had been buying anonymized summaries of people's emails from Unroll.me, which would allow the ride-hailing app to figure out how many of its customers had switched to Lyft based on the emails they got.

It's all there in the files no one reads

Hedaya notes in his blog post that the fact that they sell people's data off is in the terms and conditions and the privacy policy, so everything is legal. This would explain why he doesn't feel the need to apologize to users from a legal standpoint, but it certainly won't do the company any favors from a PR standpoint.

Users are, understandably, upset and ready to revoke the app access to their inboxes. Even if an actual apology were to come now, the company's public image is officially ruined.