HubSpot leadership has admitted they “made a mistake” after their decision to automatically enroll customers into a data-sharing initiative sparked a community backlash.
The business announced a change to its terms on July 1 that would allow customer enrichment data to be shared across accounts. Customers would have to opt out of the process manually if they did not want to be included. By July 5, following a swathe of criticism from the HubSpot community, the company reversed its position and apologized.
HubSpot Opt-Out Controversy Explained
HubSpot told customers that it was “expanding its data discovery and intelligence features” to bring “more robust and reliable data” to customers. The company wrote in an update: “To power these tools, enrichment data such as business contact details, employer information, and email deliverability signals, may be shared with other customers.”
The next line insists that customers have “complete control” over their settings, and you can review or modify these settings any time. But, controversially, those who did not want to have their data collected and shared by HubSpot would have had to opt out of their data being used for AI model training and stop using enrichment features before August 4.
This prompted a backlash from the HubSpot community. Fractional CRO and host of the She Sells B2B podcast, Saarika Chotai, shared a screenshot of the email that outlined the policy change.
She wrote on LinkedIn that the move was “another reason to boycott” HubSpot, adding: “If you’re a business using HubSpot (or any CRM for that matter), this is your PSA to read the small print. As you’ll soon realise that ‘your data’ has started becoming ‘our data’ according to HubSpot.”
A range of HubSpot leadership figures went on to publicly announce the backtrack in the policy after “hearing feedback from our customers”.
Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot, replied to Saarika’s post, saying: “Sorry. You are right. We made a mistake and are reversing that decision.”
Dharmesh provided a link to a post by Chief Product and Technology Officer at HubSpot, Duncan Lennox, who wrote in a HubSpot community post on July 5: “We made a mistake. Nothing matters more to us than the trust of our customers, and with our recent terms of service update we let you down. We are sorry about that. We will not move forward with the terms of service changes we communicated on July 1, 2026.”
In the community post, Duncan said that prospecting is important for customers who need to build pipelines, but for a long time, much of the market treated outbound as a “volume game”, using generic lists and “spray-and-pray” campaigns.
He added that “a continuously refining dataset could play a role in improving accuracy, deliverability, and outcomes for everyone” – claiming that this was the motivation behind their original announcement.
But Duncan said that they did not meet the standard expected from HubSpot when it comes to transparency, and the way it was rolled out made it feel like the relationship customers had with their CRM was “changing underneath you”.
He said that HubSpot would not move forward with the terms of service changes announced on July 1.
Chief Customer Officer at HubSpot, John Dick, had initially announced on LinkedIn that the company would be “launching Contact Discovery on August 4” and would be “updating our data terms” to support this.
He later updated the post, writing: “After hearing feedback from our customers, we will not move forward with the terms of service changes we communicated on July 1, 2026. You control your data. This has always been our policy and will not change.”
Customers Care About Their Data
As Salesforce found out earlier this year, customers care deeply about sharing their data and how SaaS hosts use it, even if it improves a feature.
In that instance, as SF Ben reported, Salesforce, attempting to be more transparent, had surfaced a setting that had previously been locked behind a support call. On finding the new setting defaulted to opted in, many wrongly interpreted this as a data grab on the part of Salesforce, despite being opted in for years in some cases via their service agreement.
While the issue was soon put to rest, Salesforce having done nothing wrong, the lesson in the importance of transparency and allowing customers to opt in stands.
Final Thoughts
HubSpot told customers they would be automatically opted into a data-sharing policy, sparking a backlash from the community. The company later announced it was scrapping the change, with several leadership figures apologizing for the move.
Broadly speaking, opt-out policies can be criticized for taking advantage of the customer’s inertia or inattentiveness. The concept of consent in many other aspects of life, legally and ethically speaking, requires active and enthusiastic agreement from both parties – not simply a lack of an outright refusal from one of them, who may not even be paying attention at that moment.
Why, then, should you be thought to have agreed to something which was outlined to you in the fine print of an email, which you may have been too busy to read?
