HubSpot Admits Mistake and Reverses Controversial Data Sharing Plan
We Got This Wrong. and We Are Fixing It
I am apologizing for a recent terms of service update that failed to meet our customers' expectations for transparency. We are immediately halting the proposed changes regarding data enrichment and reaffirming that your CRM data belongs to you. Moving forward, we will ensure any future features involving your data are fully opt-in, clearly communicated, and designed to rebuild the trust we let down.
Nothing matters more to us than the trust of our customers, and with our recent terms of service update we let you down.
- Dwedit
When you have a headline that does not say what the actual topic is, and you are forced to click the article to find out the topic, that is called "clickbait".
- chewbacha
This sounds like Claude apologizing for making a CRM.
What actually happened???
- themgt
HubSpot has been building a different solution for our customers. On August 4, Contact Discovery launches — and for the first time, your team can find, verify, and add net-new contacts without ever leaving HubSpot.
To support that, we’re updating our Customer Terms of Service, Product Specific Terms, Privacy Policy, Sub-Processors Page and Data Processing Agreement, effective July 1, 2026. This post explains what’s changing and why.
The contacts you find through Contact Discovery are reliable because they’ve been checked for deliverability, accuracy, and whether that person is still at that company. You’re not buying a raw list and hoping for the best. Every contact that surfaces has been validated, and decision-makers are ranked first.
That quality is only possible because of a shared dataset. When you opt into enrichment, some of your business contact data helps keep that dataset current. Everyone who participates gets more accurate data back in return. You never pay for a contact already in your CRM, and there’s no separate contract.
These are the new leads. These are the HubSpot leads, data mined from your own HubSpot account. And to you they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers. I'd wish you all good luck, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it.