Hey, author here. When I first found out about my secret profile, I was fairly upset, and it took a little bit to put into words why I was upset. (It's public data!) The real reason is I don't know what they have. Even Facebook at least allows you to request a copy of your data, and other similar sites are employee opt-in. There's nothing in their Privacy Policy about the collected - only for customers.
There's barriers to find out what exactly's scraped, and what data of mine they're selling to other companies. I have to question - is it even legal to scrape my contact information and sell it? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'd like to at least know what's being sold here.
I should have a call this week with them to discuss further, after which I'll update my post.
It depends on the jurisdiction. I'm not a lawyer but I believe that this is allowed in USA (IMHO there's only a recent movement to restrict this for non-adults in California), but restricted in EU privacy legislation.
I would be worried about being misrepresented, as well. Who knows how they interpret the data they scrape and present it to others?
Edit: I just saw that one of the first features they present on their home page is their "Gild Score". Since I've made fairly few contributions to open source it's safe to say mine would be quite low, regardless of how well I perform at my day job.
Precisely one of the issues I have, and one I brought up in the email (could I be essentially "blacklisted" by taking issue with their tactics? Left up but painted in a negative light?) I don't believe they'd do it, but they have the power to, and I don't like it.
IIRC there's some established history about lists of facts not being copyrightable, so you can't stop someone from copying them or selling them? However, if they're copying prose from your resume/github that describes past jobs, etc. That seems like it would definitely be governed by copyright and they wouldn't have the right to charge money for it or otherwise use it without your permission.
In my case my resume is almost entirely prose (for this reason, and others), not lists of skills/etc so it would definitely not be legal for Gild to scrape it and resell it.
There's barriers to find out what exactly's scraped, and what data of mine they're selling to other companies. I have to question - is it even legal to scrape my contact information and sell it? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'd like to at least know what's being sold here.
I should have a call this week with them to discuss further, after which I'll update my post.