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On July 1, HubSpot announced new terms of service that allowed the company to take one company’s enrichment data and use it to enrich or supplement another company’s records. Then it automatically opted in for all its customers.
Their response was quick and quite furious.
“What is HubSpot thinking?” Gabe Larsen, CRO at Atonom, wrote on LinkedIn. “Imagine sending your customers an email that basically says, ‘Thank you for spending years building your CRM. We may use your data to improve our product for everyone. You are registered by default.'”
Channing Ferrer, CRO at Brevo and former HubSpot executive, wrote“Using one company’s data to help a competitor is crazy. Disappointed with this decision by HubSpot. First-party customer data should not be shared by a CRM vendor. 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 are really, really sorry
On July 5, HubSpot was in an emergency situation my fault fashion. “We made a mistake. Nothing matters more to us than the trust of our customers,” said Duncan Lennox, director of product and technology, in an article on the company blog entitled “We were wrong and we are correcting it. »
The cause of the disaster was Contact Discovery, a product scheduled to launch on August 4, designed to allow teams to find, verify, and add new contacts without leaving HubSpot.
On the surface, it’s a smart product. Prospecting data has a slightly short lifespan longer than a mayflyso automatically refreshing this dataset is a good idea. HubSpot wanted to use shared enrichment pools to solve this problem by allowing participating customers to enhance each other’s records. The more current information organizations provide, the more valuable the data set becomes.
That’s why the company has updated its Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Data Processing Agreement to allow professional 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 “Trust Prospecting.”
“Read charitably, this was business card level data in a shared pool, with administrative controls,” Melissa Rosenthal said on her blog, The state of the brand. “The way customers actually read it, the CRM they were told they had was quietly becoming an entry into a data product sold to everyone, including potentially their competitors. »
The written trace grows longer
The controversy might have ended with HubSpot’s apology if Clark Barron hadn’t started digging into the company’s historical documentation.
Barron, founder of threat intelligence firm GTM Blackout, traced the language surrounding HubSpot’s enrichment program through archived product terms, help articles and policy documents. It turns out that the July announcement wasn’t an entirely new direction.
“Permission to copy your enrichment data into HubSpot’s business dataset has been in the product-specific terms since September 18, 2024,” Barron wrote. “The Internet lost it. Just. ‘They’re going to start sharing my data’ – no. They already did. I removed the paper trail.”
Blackout expanded on this research in an advisory titled “The 652 day gap.” This gap corresponds to the time between HubSpot changing its terms and sending the email informing customers.
“They didn’t just let you down.”
The report showed changes to HubSpot’s help documentation during this period. For part of 2025, a knowledge base article stated: “HubSpot will not share the data listed above with other accounts.” This language was later removed. Barron highlighted the discrepancy in a LinkedIn post:
“They didn’t just fail to tell you. They told you otherwise, then took the sentence away.”
The notice also examined the controls available to customers. The study identified five enrichment settings that control how records are enriched, but concluded that none specifically governed whether customer-provided data was included in the shared enrichment dataset. “There are five enrichment buttons. All five determine whether your records receive enrichment. None determine whether your data is contributed or shared.”
All of this seems to contradict the core value of the HubSpot brand.
“HubSpot’s market position, which has allowed it to charge SMBs a premium over Salesforce for two decades, is ‘we are the vendor on your side,’” Melissa Rosenthal said. “A data cooperative is not inconsistent with this position. Many customers would happily trade business card data for significantly better prospecting. The value exchange is defensible. But a value exchange must be offered, visibly, with the price visible.”
Top-notch emergency response, but…
HubSpot’s response to all of this so far has been a model of crisis management.
The blog post “arrived quickly, four days from the effective date to the full retraction, over a holiday weekend no less,” Rosenthal said. “It’s written in the first person. It names the specific failure…instead of resorting to the classic ‘we’re sorry you’re feeling confused.’ It explains the original intention without using that intention as an excuse. And he thanks customers for “their comments, their reluctance and their honesty”, which amounts to admitting 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 sustainable data gap is a network effect, a set of data that improves because customers use it.”
Or, as Duncan Lennox said: “We always believe there is a better, more effective way to prospect than the status quo. But we must earn your trust as we build it together.” He also pledged that future enrichment capabilities will provide customers with “clear, upfront control over your participation and how your data is used in that context.”
With AI, operational marketing data, including deliverability signals, engagement metrics, and behavioral insights, becomes the fuel that powers products. As vendors build systems that depend on this data, marketers must evaluate AI capabilities and governance, transparency and customer control. They also need to ask themselves if the value they get justifies the data they contribute to improving someone else’s product.
The position HubSpot changes course after customers reject data sharing appeared first on MarTech.
