Last week, HubSpot updated its terms of service to allow enrichment data to be shared across customer accounts.
The policy covered business contact details, employer information, and email deliverability signals.
However, the most consequential aspect of the CRM giant’s move was the decision to set opt-out as the default setting, meaning customers were automatically enrolled unless they manually took action to remove themselves.
Just four days later, the company had scrapped the plan entirely.
The backlash was loud and fast. Most of it played out on LinkedIn, where CRM users, sales leaders, and RevOps professionals made their frustrations clear.
Brent Leary, a Partner at CRM Essentials, summed up much of the indignation in his succinct response to the news:
“Damn… What was HubSpot thinking with this.”
Caitlin O. Bigelow, CMO at Blazel, was more detailed in her condemnation of HubSpot’s decision, claiming that the company had “truly lost their way,” and she was cutting ties after 15 years as a customer.
“What happened last week was the egregious final straw… they sent an unassuming email saying they would start mining your customer data to provide to your competitors.
“Let’s unpack the ramifications of that. YOU worked hard to gain an email subscriber. HUBSPOT feeds that prospect data into a shared data set your competitor gets by default. Does that p**s you off?”
“Not to mention the barrage of spam you’re going to start getting from companies you never opted in to hear from. Hubspot, I’ve used you across three companies for 15 years. I get that I’m a nobody, but I cannot scream f&&k that loud enough.
“Blazel switched CRMs this week, and I’ll never go back.
Bigelow’s response captured the two concerns that drove most of the anger: first, that data customers had worked to build could end up surfaced to direct competitors by default; and second, that the opt-out mechanic meant many wouldn’t even realize it was happening.
For a platform whose brand is built on inbound philosophy and permission-based marketing, being on the wrong side of a consent argument was a particularly hard position to defend.
Following the outpouring of complaints and criticisms, Duncan Lennox, Chief Product and Technology Officer at HubSpot, used an official company community post to backtrack and confirm that the terms of service changes will no longer go ahead.
“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,” Lennox wrote in the official blog.
“We did not meet the standard you expect from HubSpot when it comes to transparency.
“The way we rolled this out made it feel like the relationship you have with your CRM, and with HubSpot, was changing underneath you. That’s on us and we are sorry.”
What HubSpot Was Actually Trying to Do
For context, the original intent wasn’t without a rationale.
Lennox described a concept the company had been developing called “Trusted Prospecting,” a vision of outbound sales that would move away from generic lists and spray-and-pray campaigns in favor of outreach informed by a shared, continuously improving enrichment dataset.
The aim was to make outreach “feel timely and useful, not like spam,” as Lennox framed it.
That idea might have landed differently with a different rollout. But the opt-out default made it look less like a product vision and more like a data grab, and users called it exactly that.
One customer, posting in the HubSpot community thread, described it as “the most alarming series of events I can imagine from a CRM,” adding that their trust in HubSpot’s “baseline commitment to protecting our data is permanently damaged.”
Another raised a pointed question: even after the rollback, was HubSpot still collecting work emails from one customer’s portal to enrich others?
The episode drew immediate comparisons to ZoomInfo’s model of pooling customer data to sell back as an intelligence product.
Whether or not that comparison was entirely fair, it landed. A company built on inbound philosophy and permission-based marketing getting caught on the wrong side of a consent argument is a particularly damaging narrative to shake.
Speaking to CX Today prior to the HubSpot news, Alicia Skubick, Chief Customer Officer at Trustpilot, discussed the dangers of being viewed as untrustworthy by your customers:
“When you think about what are the fundamentals of trust… it’s really kind of your reliability, your transparency, and the respect in which you treat your customers.”
On reliability and transparency, HubSpot’s original announcement fell short on both counts before users had even finished reading it.
The Rollback, and the Questions That Remain
HubSpot has now confirmed that the terms of service changes will not go ahead.
Lennox committed that any future enrichment capabilities making use of customer data will be “fully and transparently opt-in,” with clear, upfront control over whether users participate and how their data is used.
The company is also reassessing how it communicates and governs the opt-in process for contact enrichment going forward.
The reversal was fast, and the acknowledgment was unusually candid for a company of HubSpot’s scale.
While this tone could well help to soften the blow, the broader question this episode raises isn’t going away any time soon.
As CRM and martech platforms push deeper into AI-powered enrichment, intelligence, and prospecting features, the line between platform capability and customer data ownership is going to keep getting tested.
HubSpot found out what happens when you draw it in the wrong place.
For now, there is no announcement on whether or when a revised version of the feature might return. “Trusted Prospecting” remains a concept on hold. And HubSpot has some work to do before those two words sit comfortably together again.
