On July 1, HubSpot announced new terms of service that allow the company to take enrichment data from one company and use it to enrich or supplement another company’s records. It then automatically selected all of its customers.
Their response was fast and furious.
“What is HubSpot thinking?” Gabe Larsen, CRO at Atonom, wrote on LinkedIn. “Imagine sending your customers an email that says: ‘Thank you for spending years building your CRM. We may use your data to make our product better for everyone. You have opted-in.'”
Channing Ferrer, CRO at Brevo and former HubSpot CEO, wrote, “Using one company’s data to help a competitor is crazy. Disappointed with this decision by HubSpot. Proprietary customer data should not be shared by a CRM provider. Period.”
Within days, HubSpot reversed course, but the change raised a big question for users: If your data is used by a marketer to make money, what do you get in return?
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On July 5, HubSpot was in emergency mode I’m guilty mode. “We made a mistake. Nothing is more important to us than the trust of our customers,” said Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox in a post on the company’s blog titled, “We Got This Wrong, and We’re Fixing It.”
The cause of the disaster was Contact Discovery, a product to be launched on August 4, designed to allow teams to find, verify, and add new contacts without leaving HubSpot.
Outside, it’s a smart product. Test data has a slightly longer lifespan than mayfly, so automatically updating that dataset is a good idea. HubSpot wanted to use shared enrichment pools to solve that problem by allowing participating customers to enhance each other’s records. When organizations provide current information, the data set becomes more valuable.
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 follow-up data from participating customers, to be added to the shared dataset for this purpose. HubSpot called it “Trusted Prospecting.”
“Learn about offering, this was ‘business card-level’ data in a shared environment, with administrative controls,” Melissa Rosenthal said on her blog, The State of The Brand. “Learn how customers really learn, the CRM they were told they had was the input to the data product sold to everyone, including their competitors.”
The paper trail is getting longer
The controversy might have ended with an apology from HubSpot if Clark Barron hadn’t started digging into the company’s historical documents.
Barron, founder of GTM threat intelligence firm Blackout, tracked down the language surrounding HubSpot’s enrichment program through archived product terms, help articles, and policy documents. It turns out that July’s announcement wasn’t an entirely new approach.
“Authorization to copy your enrichment data into HubSpot’s marketing dataset remains in the Product Specific Terms as of September 18, 2024,” Barron wrote. “The internet is gone. Great. ‘They’re going to start sharing my data’ – no. They already are. I’ve pulled a paper trail.”
Blackout expanded on that research with advice titled “The 652-Day Gap.” That gap is the time between HubSpot changing its terms and sending an email to notify customers.
‘They just failed.’
The report pointed to changes in HubSpot’s help documentation during that time. Halfway through 2025, the information base article said, “HubSpot will not share the data listed above with other accounts.” That language was later removed. Barron highlighted the discrepancy in a LinkedIn post:
“They simply failed to tell you, they told you the opposite, and then removed the sentence.”
The advisor also reviewed the controls available to clients. It found five enrichment settings that controlled how records received updates, but concluded that none directly controlled whether customer-contributed data was included in the shared enrichment dataset. “There are five enrichment changes. All five govern whether your records are enhanced. None govern whether your data is donated or shared.”
All of that seems to go against HubSpot’s core product value.
“HubSpot’s entire marketplace, the thing that’s allowed it to charge SMBs a premium against Salesforce for two decades, is ‘we’re the seller on your side,'” says Melissa Rosenthal. “The data co-op doesn’t fit that scenario. Most customers would happily trade business card-level data for better deals. The exchange of value is secure. But the exchange of value should be offered, clearly, with a price tag reflected.”
High emergencies, but…
Until now, HubSpot’s answer to all of this has been a risk management model.
The blog post “came fast, four days from effective date to full withdrawal, over a holiday weekend no less,” Rosenthal said. “It’s written in the first person. It means direct 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. It also thanks customers for ‘feedback, feedback, and honesty,’ which is an acknowledgment that the fix came out of nowhere. “
However, as Rosenthal noted, “apology changes goals. HubSpot still aims to build a shared network of enrichment because “the only solid data is the network effect, a dataset that gets better because customers use it.”
Or, as Duncan Lennox put it, “We still believe there is a better, more effective way of thinking than the status quo. But we have to earn your trust as we build it together.” He also pledged that future enrichment capabilities will provide customers with “clear, up-front control over who you participate in and how your data is used in this context.”
Thanks to AI, performance marketing data – including delivery signals, engagement metrics, and behavioral information – is becoming the fuel that powers brands. As marketers build systems dependent on that data, marketers need to explore AI capabilities as well as management, transparency, and customer control. They should also ask if the value they receive justifies the data they donate to improve someone else’s product.
