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Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

(medium.com)
1121 points alokedesai | 1 comments | 28 Oct 15 19:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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aarontcheung ◴[28 Oct 15 22:42 UTC] 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.

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andy_ppp ◴[28 Oct 15 23:14 UTC] 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.

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1. leroy_masochist ◴[29 Oct 15 04:48 UTC] No.10469327[source]▶
I think a "no selling personal data" policy would make sense...user profiles, email addresses, credit cards, mailing addresses, photos, relationships with other users (e.g., if LinkedIn went out of business they shouldn't be able to sell the list of people to whom I am first-degree connected)

On the other hand, I think that proprietarily-generated data would be fair game if anonymized. A massive data set showing how people's usage of a given service varies based on age, geography, type of phone, whatever -- I think selling that to a third party would be morally and ethically defensible. [0]

There are likely a lot of edge cases here (the LinkedIn example above might be one), and it's an interesting topic. With all that said, recycling all of Homejoy's users' account info into a new enterprise without their explicit consent seems pretty plainly wrong to me.

Prediction: the fact that there's still no word from @sama or @paul probably means that they're working hard to provide a clear and decisive written response to this incident -- probably one that amounts to a new YC policy of some sort.

[0]: IANAL and not sure whether the possibility of an eventual sale of such user-generated data would need to be mentioned in the service's T&Cs from the get-go.