Unroll.me's classic non-apology not good enough

Like most people these days I'm drowning in a sea of emails. So when I read a recommendation in Benjamin Law's column for a nifty little email digest service called Unroll.me I decided to give it a shot.

Unroll.me works by diverting all emails you receive from nominated companies or people and consolidating them into one daily email. Using it means my personal email inbox is clear of promotional emails from retailers, feedback emails from service providers and the other regular non-essential communications that clog inboxes. 

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(Yes I know I could just unsubscribe but Unroll.me lets me go back and access those emails if I need to).

I was a happy Unroll.me user until I read about the start-up's role in Uber's controversial growth. In Mike Isaac's story, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick plays with fire, Isaac reveals that Unroll.me's owner, Slice, scrapes data in users inboxes and onsells it. 

"Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers' emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymised data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft's business," Isaacs writes. 

Clearly I'm a sucker but I thought Unroll.me's business model was based on the advertising it runs in the email digest rather than data scraping.  

It seems I wasn't the only Unroll.me user to be slightly taken aback by the liberties Unroll.me is taking with users data and Unroll.me chief executive and founder Jojo Hedaya posted an apology today.  

Unfortunately, as apologies go Hedaya's is a stinker.

Entitled "We can do better" Hedaya falls into the classic non-apology trap of apologising, not for Unroll.me's actions, but for the fact people are upset. 

"Our users are the heart of our company and service," he writes. "So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetise our free service."

Yes Unroll.me is a free service and it needs to make money somehow, but pulling financial details out of users inboxes and onselling them, seems to me to be a step too far. 

Of course Unroll.me has protected itself in the fine print but as Hedaya acknowledges this isn't enough. 

Yes Unroll.me is a free service and it needs to make money somehow, but pulling financial details out of users inboxes and onselling them, seems to me to be a step too far.

"While we try our best to be open about our business model, recent customer feedback tells me we weren't explicit enough. Sure we have a terms of service agreement and a plain-English privacy policy that our users agree they have read and understand before they even sign up, but the reality is most of us – myself included – don't take the time to thoroughly review them."

Hedaya promises Unroll.me will do better. This doesn't seem to involve changing the type of information it sells or the way it sells it, rather Unroll.me will try to be more open with users. 

"We need to do better for our users, and will from this point forward, with clearer messaging on our website, in our app, and in our FAQs," Hedaya writes. "We will also be more clear about our data usage in our on-boarding process."

It's a classic non-apology of the type that is all too common.  

Think of the initial apology of United Airlines chief executive Oscar Munoz  after a doctor was forcibly dragged from a United plane. His initial response was to defend the policy of overbooking and its ruthless consequences in a letter to employees, saying he "emphatically" stood behind them.

Then there was Gary Johnston, of Jaycar Electronics, apologising for the actions of Canterbury Bulldogs players (which Jaycar sponsors) inviting Channel Nine reporter Jayne Azzopardi to "S--k me off, you dumb dog".

"I'm not excusing it, I'm just saying ..." Johnston said.

Unroll.me's apology can be added to this rich vein of "sorry, not sorry" apologies.

Unsurprisingly Unroll.me users were not particularly impressed in their responses to Hedaya's apology.

"We are so sorry we got busted", one helpfully summarised. 

"We thought we'd conceal information that our users would obviously find relevant behind a wall of legalese, because we don't actually give a darn, but our PR people told us that a giant middle finger graphic in this space would go over poorly," another writes. 

What all of this has taught us is Unroll.me can indeed do better.

Start with a better apology. 

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