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Poll: How Often Do Strangers Ask For Your Customer Data?

1 points by billymeltdown ↗ HN
How often do you get requests from people you do not know, by email, asking for break downs of your customers and their market segment? I ask because it's <i>not</i> cool and it seems to be happening more and more frequently.

4 comments

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jacquesm
That sounds like your competitors trying to get a leg up.
billymeltdown
Well, yeah, but you would not believe how often, brazen, and somewhat sycophantic it is. Some of these messages seem so... oblivious. They even admit that they are working on competing projects. It's starting to get weird.
jacquesm
Do you have something special on the go ?

I remember that in the early days of the webcam - before I realized the value of what we were doing - we'd get the weirdest visitors, ostensibly to meet to see if they could 'partner' and under this guise they would ask all kinds of questions that would be none of their business.

Eventually I wised up to it, which is why my first response to you was that it sounds like competitors.

Keep your cool, make sure the people you work with (also in lower positions) know that you're under a mild form of attack. Especially front line people are prone to being 'pumped' for sensitive information.

billymeltdown
That's good advice, Jacques! Most of these requests are about our time tracker (Tempo), not any secret project. We're a pretty small shop, so everyone's wise to it at this point.