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’s records. Then it automatically opted in all of its customers.
Their response was fast and quite furious.
“What the hell is HubSpot thinking?” Gabe Larsen, CRO at Atonom, wrote on LinkedIn. “Imagine sending your customers an email that basically says: ‘Thanks for spending years building your CRM. We might use your data to make our product better for everyone else. You’re opted in by default.’”
Channing Ferrer, CRO at Brevo and a former HubSpot exec, wrote, “Using one company’s 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.”
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?
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We’re very, very sorry
By July 5, HubSpot was in emergency mea culpa mode. “We made a mistake. Nothing matters more to us than the trust of our customers,” Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox said in a post on the company’s blog entitled, “We Got This Wrong, and We Are Fixing It.”
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.
On the surface, it’s a smart product. Prospecting data has a lifespan slightly longer than a mayfly, 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’s records. The more organizations contribute current information, the more valuable the dataset becomes.
That’s 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 “Trusted Prospecting.”
“Read charitably, this was ‘business card level’ data in a shared pool, with admin controls,” Melissa Rosenthal said on her blog, The State of The Brand. “Read the way customers actually read it, the CRM they’d been told they owned was quietly becoming an input to a data product sold back to everyone else, potentially including their competitors.”
The paper trail gets longer
The controversy might have ended with HubSpot’s apology had Clark Barron not started digging into the company’s historical documentation.
Barron, founder of GTM threat intelligence firm Blackout, traced the language surrounding HubSpot’s enrichment program through archived product terms, help articles, and policy documents. It turns out the July announcement was not an entirely new direction.
“The authorization to copy your enrichment data into HubSpot’s commercial dataset has been sitting in the Product Specific Terms since September 18, 2024,” Barron wrote. “The internet lost it. Fair. ‘They’re going to start sharing my data’ — no. They already were. I pulled the paper trail.”
Blackout expanded that research in an advisory titled “The 652-Day Gap.” That gap is the time between HubSpot changing its terms and sending the email notifying customers.
‘They didn’t just fail you.’
The report showed changes to HubSpot’s help documentation during that period. For part of 2025, a knowledge base article stated, “HubSpot won’t share the data listed above with other accounts.” That language was later removed. Barron highlighted the discrepancy in a LinkedIn post:
“They didn’t just fail to tell you. They told you the opposite, then removed the sentence.”
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. “There are five enrichment toggles. All five govern whether your records receive enrichment. None governs whether your data is contributed or shared.”
All of that seems to contradict HubSpot’s core brand value.
“HubSpot’s entire market position, the thing that let it charge SMBs a premium against Salesforce for two decades, is ‘we’re the vendor on your side,’” Melissa Rosenthal said. “A data co-op isn’t 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.”
Top-notch emergency response, but …
So far, HubSpot’s response to all this has been a model of crisis management.
The blog post “came fast, four days from effective date to full retraction, over a holiday weekend no less,” Rosenthal said. “It’s written in the first person. It names the specific failure … instead of reaching for the classic ‘we’re sorry you felt confused.’ It explains the original intent without using that intent as an excuse. And it thanks customers for ‘the feedback, the pushback, and the honesty,’ which is an admission that the correction came from outside the building.”
However, as Rosenthal noted, “the apology reverses the terms. It does not reverse the strategy,” she wrote. HubSpot still intends to build a shared enrichment network because “the only durable data moat is a network effect, a dataset that improves because customers use it.”
Or, as Duncan Lennox put it, “We 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.” He also committed that future enrichment capabilities would provide customers with “clear, upfront control over whether you participate and how your data is used in this context.”
Operational marketing data — including deliverability signals, engagement metrics, and behavioral information — is becoming the fuel that powers AI 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’re contributing to improve someone else’s product.
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