{"id":11170,"date":"2026-07-07T18:44:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T00:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11170"},"modified":"2026-07-07T18:44:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T00:44:29","slug":"hubspot-reverses-course-after-customers-reject-data-sharing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11170","title":{"rendered":"HubSpot reverses course after customers reject data sharing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

On July 1, HubSpot announced new terms of service that allowed the company to take enrichment data from one company and use it to enrich or supplement another company\u2019s records. Then it automatically opted in all of its customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Their response was fast and quite furious.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the hell is HubSpot thinking?\u201d Gabe Larsen, CRO at Atonom, wrote on LinkedIn<\/a>. \u201cImagine sending your customers an email that basically says: \u2018Thanks for spending years building your CRM. We might use your data to make our product better for everyone else. You\u2019re opted in by default.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Channing Ferrer, CRO at Brevo and a former HubSpot exec, wrote<\/a>, \u201cUsing one company\u2019s data to help a competitor is crazy. Disappointed in this decision by HubSpot. Proprietary customer data should not be shared by a CRM provider. Period.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within days, HubSpot reversed course, but the reversal raised a bigger question for users: If your data is used by a vendor to make money, what do you get in return?\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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We\u2019re very, very sorry<\/h2>\n

By July 5, HubSpot was in emergency mea culpa<\/em> mode. \u201cWe made a mistake. Nothing matters more to us than the trust of our customers,\u201d Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox said in a post on the company\u2019s blog<\/a> entitled, \u201cWe Got This Wrong, and We Are Fixing It.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cause of the disaster was Contact Discovery, a product set to launch on August 4, designed to let teams find, verify, and add net-new contacts without leaving HubSpot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the surface, it\u2019s a smart product. Prospecting data has a lifespan slightly longer than a mayfly<\/a>, so automatically refreshing that dataset is a good idea. HubSpot wanted to use shared enrichment pools to solve that problem by allowing participating customers to improve one another\u2019s records. The more organizations contribute current information, the more valuable the dataset becomes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the company updated its TOS, privacy policy, and data processing agreement to allow business contact, company, and email engagement data, as well as tracking data from participating customers, to be added to a shared dataset for this purpose. HubSpot called it \u201cTrusted Prospecting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRead charitably, this was \u2018business card level\u2019 data in a shared pool, with admin controls,\u201d Melissa Rosenthal said on her blog, The State of The Brand<\/a>. \u201cRead the way customers actually read it, the CRM they\u2019d been told they owned was quietly becoming an input to a data product sold back to everyone else, potentially including their competitors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper trail gets longer<\/h2>\n

The controversy might have ended with HubSpot\u2019s apology had Clark Barron not started digging into the company\u2019s historical documentation.<\/p>\n

Barron, founder of GTM threat intelligence firm Blackout, traced the language surrounding HubSpot\u2019s enrichment program through archived product terms, help articles, and policy documents. It turns out the July announcement was not an entirely new direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe authorization to copy your enrichment data into HubSpot\u2019s commercial dataset has been sitting in the Product Specific Terms since September 18, 2024,\u201d Barron wrote. \u201cThe internet lost it. Fair. \u2018They\u2019re going to start sharing my data\u2019 \u2014 no. They already were. I pulled the paper trail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blackout expanded that research in an advisory titled \u201cThe 652-Day Gap<\/a>.\u201d That gap is the time between HubSpot changing its terms and sending the email notifying customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018They didn\u2019t just fail you.\u2019<\/h2>\n

The report showed changes to HubSpot\u2019s help documentation during that period. For part of 2025, a knowledge base article stated, \u201cHubSpot won\u2019t share the data listed above with other accounts.\u201d<\/em> That language was later removed. Barron highlighted the discrepancy in a LinkedIn post:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t just fail to tell you. They told you the opposite, then removed the sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The advisory also examined the controls available to customers. It found five enrichment settings that control how records receive enrichment, but concluded that none specifically governed whether customer-contributed data was included in the shared enrichment dataset. \u201cThere are five enrichment toggles. All five govern whether your records receive enrichment. None governs whether your data is contributed or shared.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of that seems to contradict HubSpot\u2019s core brand value.<\/p>\n

\u201cHubSpot\u2019s entire market position, the thing that let it charge SMBs a premium against Salesforce for two decades, is \u2018we\u2019re the vendor on your side,\u2019\u201d Melissa Rosenthal said. \u201cA data co-op isn\u2019t incompatible with that position. Plenty of customers would happily trade business card-level data for dramatically better prospecting. The value exchange is defensible. But a value exchange has to be offered, visibly, with the price tag showing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Top-notch emergency response, but \u2026<\/h2>\n<\/p>

So far, HubSpot\u2019s response to all this has been a model of crisis management.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The blog post \u201ccame fast, four days from effective date to full retraction, over a holiday weekend no less,\u201d Rosenthal said. \u201cIt\u2019s written in the first person. It names the specific failure \u2026 instead of reaching for the classic \u2018we\u2019re sorry you felt confused.\u2019 It explains the original intent without using that intent as an excuse. And it thanks customers for \u2018the feedback, the pushback, and the honesty,\u2019 which is an admission that the correction came from outside the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as Rosenthal noted, \u201cthe apology reverses the terms. It does not reverse the strategy,\u201d she wrote. HubSpot still intends to build a shared enrichment network because \u201cthe only durable data moat is a network effect, a dataset that improves because customers use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, as Duncan Lennox put it, \u201cWe still believe that there is a better, more effective way to prospect than the status quo. But we have to earn your trust as we build it together.\u201d He also committed that future enrichment capabilities would provide customers with \u201cclear, upfront control over whether you participate and how your data is used in this context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to AI, operational marketing data \u2014 including deliverability signals, engagement metrics, and behavioral information \u2014 is becoming the fuel that powers products. As vendors build systems that depend on that data, marketers need to evaluate AI capabilities and governance, transparency, and customer control. They must also ask if the value they get justifies the data they\u2019re contributing to improve someone else\u2019s product.<\/p>\n

The post HubSpot reverses course after customers reject data sharing<\/a> appeared first on MarTech<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On July 1, HubSpot announced new terms of service that allowed the company to take enrichment data from one company and use it to enrich or supplement another company\u2019s records. Then it automatically opted in all of its customers.\u00a0 Their response was fast and quite furious.\u00a0 \u201cWhat the hell is HubSpot thinking?\u201d Gabe Larsen, CRO … <\/p>\n

Read more “HubSpot reverses course after customers reject data sharing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"medium":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"large":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"inspiro-featured-image":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"inspiro-loop":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"inspiro-loop@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-masonry":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-masonry@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_cinema":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_portrait":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_portrait@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_square":["https:\/\/martech.org\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2025\/11\/semrush-one.webp",0,0,false]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}