I just got an email from g2*com to review particle.io with the offer of a $25 Amazon gift certificate to review Particle.
Is this legitimate? Did Particle provide my contact information to this marketing firm?
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I think so. I received an email a day before letting me know about that from Particle:
reply-to: deepa.mungara@particle.io
It’s kind of terrible that in order to leave a review you have to also set up an account with G2, which has a much more liberal privacy policy than particle.
It’ also kind of disgusting that there’s no indication if gift cards are still available, or about the timeline of when these marketing emails were sent out.
It would have been much better if particle asked it’s users to participate directly rather than handing over our data to their “marketing partner”.
yeah, I guess that's an old marketing trick...
Hi everyone - we empathize with your concerns and rest assured we are solely running a campaign for reviews. Here is language from the G2 Data Policy Agreement: “G2 will not sell, rent, disclose, release, transfer, make available or otherwise communicate Personal Information to a third party for monetary or other valuable consideration.”
If you did not create a G2 account to review Particle, then your information will not be stored by them.
We really appreciate your feedback. In the future, we will make sure to add the above language to our email communications and will be clear about how we will handle your data.
Similar to other vendors in our space, we are leveraging G2 to promote our services and one of the best ways to do that is asking our users to share their experiences with our platform. We know your time is valuable. We set aside gift cards as a small token of our appreciation for anyone that leaves a quality review.
If you have any concerns feel free to reach out to me directly at deepa.mungara@particle.io or email privacy@particle.io.
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I don’t think any company that has any interest in security should be encouraging their users to respond to 3rd party survey or review emails. You need to send these invitations from a particle.io address and link to a https*//particle.io/ URL.
Users should not be in the habit of establishing trust based on 3rd party claims. It’s kind of like the banks who partner with 3rd party companies to do feedback surveys- you get an email from a random company claiming to be “partnered with yourbank*com”. The user has no way to verify it. Or the phone call claiming be confirming activity on your credit card, please confirm the last 4 digits of your social security number.
Particle needs to send the link and the link should point to an intermediate page hosted at particle.io, for instance https*//particle.io/post-your-review with a brief explanation: "Help us grow the Particle ecosystem by sharing your experience with our partner G2. [Leave your review] "
Sorry for the long post, this isn’t exactly news to anyone who cares about security.
:
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Thanks for the idea. We sent an email to all our users on Monday letting them know they’ll be getting an email with G2. However, as I mentioned in the last post, we’ll add more specific language should we choose to run these campaigns in the future.
Thanks for your response. I didn’t get that email- I checked my inbox, trash and spam folders. Hence the confusion.
Just some more feedback here… 1) I appreciate Particle wanting to engage with their user base for feedback and ideas. Figure out what’s working well and where improvement is needed. It’s great. However, I’ve been a bit upset with the approach of using G2 or maybe the practice of G2. First, I took the 10-15 minutes or however long it took to provide a in depth review. I looked at it as a mechanism to help Particle to understand where they need to take the product and what is working very well and where improvement is needed. I guess I was a sucker for the supposed amazon gift card. For whatever reason, my “account with particle could not be verified” or “I don’t have a professional account” line of BS now states that my survey response was not accepted and of course no gift card. I took a screen shot of the Particle Console and YES i did provide a business account info@(mydomainname).com. I even went in twice to try and update it to no avail. That’s all fine and good but now I get a daily or several emails a day from G2 directly. So yes, i understood G2 doesn’t sell my info to other email marketing companies but they certainly are now spamming me. So 1) I wasted 15 minutes filling out a survey that supposedly Particle won’t even see because it got rejected, 2) didn’t get a gift card they claimed was there, 3) now being spammed with email… I am normally not one to complain like this but certainly wanted to let Particle know the practice of this type of survey is not appreciated. Hope that helps for the future. (By the way… I had many great things I did share in the survey… hopefully you saw those things). 
It's really, really easy to create your own survey and this is why you should do it yourself.
Moreover the fact that data is collected by a 3rd party "Partner" doesn't really lend any additional credibility to a review, especially not when it's a marketing firm.