←back to thread

1121 points alokedesai | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
aarontcheung ◴[] No.10467925[source]
I'm one of the founders of Homejoy. I'm still very passionate about the home service space. After leaving Homejoy, I started FlyMaids, where we're exploring a few different angles on the space.

We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy.

We're a small team that has been focused on moving quickly while bootstraping. We tried to quickly test different approaches, but we realize now that we did so in an unclear manner. We recognize the need to use the data we acquired responsibily. As a result, we're taking the site down, and we're going to do a better job with our testing moving forward.

replies(30): >>10467939 #>>10467957 #>>10467983 #>>10467987 #>>10467997 #>>10468007 #>>10468009 #>>10468010 #>>10468016 #>>10468028 #>>10468043 #>>10468068 #>>10468072 #>>10468078 #>>10468091 #>>10468187 #>>10468193 #>>10468221 #>>10468225 #>>10468376 #>>10468464 #>>10468597 #>>10468684 #>>10468700 #>>10468782 #>>10468805 #>>10468825 #>>10469434 #>>10472300 #>>10505131 #
andy_ppp ◴[] No.10468091[source]
I'm actually tempted to write a response so harsh I'd probably be banned from hacker news.

Instead I genuinely hope that YC will force companies taking the 7% into a no selling on data policy; I'm not saying that is easy to write but I am saying this situation without response smears YC, something I'm sure could be avoided in future.

replies(3): >>10468685 #>>10468988 #>>10469327 #
1. roel_v ◴[] No.10468988[source]
"Instead I genuinely hope that YC will force companies taking the 7% into a no selling on data policy"

I did a paper on (sort of) this in law school. My focus was on civil law systems and I'm not claiming I'm the world's foremost expert on this topic.

With that out of the way, it's not that easy. When a company goes bankrupt, it doesn't have a say on what happens to its assets. Furthermore, a liquidator doesn't have to honor commitments made by the company. (this is also why 'software escrow' in the cheap form that is implemented so often is, imo, legally on shaky ground - this was the actual topic of my paper).

So what are the options? One is to put the 'ownership' of customer data (what that means exactly is a whole discussion in itself) into a separate company. But that company can't be owned by the 'real' company, it's tricky in many way. And costly. And makes things (very) difficult, operationally. And it takes away the ownership of a critical asset, making it near impossible to get investment (because who will invest in a company that doesn't 'own' its customer data?) Etc. I don't think anyone follows through on their claims of being 'careful with customer data' to this extent, but then again, of course I don't know the operations of every company in the world.

Basically, once you are in a database of a company, and if that database is worth anything, you are up shit creek when that company goes bust - good intentions and promises do not matter one bit. A new guy comes in who doesn't care about his 'reputation' in the field the company was in, who has a legal duty to get the highest price for any assets, and who is not bound by anything the company did or said. It doesn't take a law degree to figure out how that works out for the 'privacy' of the (former) users/customers.

replies(1): >>10477892 #
2. Lawtonfogle ◴[] No.10477892[source]
What about a legal agreement with the users that the information will be deleted before a bankruptcy is filed and if they fail to deliver, then the users are owed so much for failure to deliver on the contract (and this debt is created in such a way it takes priority over other debt). Make the debt big enough that anyone owed money for a reason other than this deal (so investors and such) would see a greater payout by deleting the information and selling the other assets with their normal claim to its worth than by attempting to sell the customer data and split the proceeds with all the users.

Also make it legally solid enough that even if there was a lawsuit, the cost of the lawsuit would be higher than the worth of the data.

replies(1): >>10482605 #
3. andy_ppp ◴[] No.10482605[source]
Brilliant idea, it's essentially you are giving a permanent license to your info; the problem below is a real one though, the investments we are seeing are often clearly hedged against resale of data... A rather scary market when Stripe will just charge credit cards if you have a users token!