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[return to "Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent?"]
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1. ammon+3A[view] [source] 2022-06-16 22:34:43
>>terafl+(OP)
I’m the CEO of Triplebyte. I just looked into this, and we are not automatically making anyone's profile public without their consent. OP, it looks like you had set your profile to be visible some time ago (I can provide details via email but won’t here for privacy purposes), and just hadn’t gotten a message until now. The support response you received was incorrect; you weren’t affected by any recent changes to the site.

Since there wasn’t anything broken on our end, there shouldn’t be anyone else impacted by this. But as part of making sure that OP wasn’t visible by mistake, I had my team double-checked to make sure our previous fix from last year was properly retroactive. It was.

More generally, I don't think that tricking anyone is a viable way for us to run a business. We’re trying to create a marketplace that can open opportunities for engineers who wouldn’t otherwise have them, and we need the trust of engineers in order to do that.

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2. terafl+vF[view] [source] 2022-06-16 23:16:50
>>ammon+3A
Thanks for responding.

As far as I can determine, the last deliberate interaction I had with Triplebyte was in May 2020, when I got an email with your name and address on it saying that my profile was about to be made public, and I replied the following day asking you to delete my account. (I assume you never saw that email, and in any case I never bothered to follow up on it through other channels.)

(EDIT: on closer inspection, the reply with my account deletion request went to candidate.support@triplebyte.com, not to you personally.)

I don't recall ever logging into my Triplebyte account between then and yesterday, and I couldn't find any evidence of doing so in my browser or search history. I guess that's your word against mine, but if you have reason to believe I'm mistaken, you're welcome to send it to me privately.

> The support response you received was incorrect

I'm very curious as to where the incorrect information came from, then.

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3. terafl+qn4[view] [source] 2022-06-18 01:09:09
>>terafl+vF
Just following up on this, in case anyone's still reading. This is the response Triplebyte sent me yesterday:

> As mentioned on HackerNews, we cannot locate any emails from you before today. After getting in touch with the product team, I realized I had made a mistake. Upon doing a bit of digging on the back end, you set your profile set to be visible in 2019 prior to the 2020 events.

I guess I can't concretely disprove this story, but I have a really hard time buying it. I don't remember even being given the option to make my profile public when I tried out Triplebyte in 2019. To back up my recollection, the messages that they sent out about the "public profiles" feature in 2020 described it pretty unequivocally as a new feature that hadn't existed previously. Archived versions of Triplebyte's FAQ from 2019/2020 make no mention of it; they only talk about the ability to be matched with companies after completing a full interview with Triplebyte (which I never did).

And if the person who initially responded to me truly did just make a mistake, that would certainly be no big deal -- but it seems like an oddly specific and convenient mistake to make.

I responded about 24 hours ago saying why I found these explanations unconvincing, and haven't heard back. I'm posting here not to try to pressure Triplebyte into a response, but because (a) I don't know how much longer this thread will stay open to new comments, and (b) I don't really think it's likely that I'll get any further closure about this issue, so I don't plan to spend any more of my time and energy on it. People are welcome to read the discussion and judge for themselves.

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