Is www.owler.com Safe?

1) Spammed me out of the blue with a message that started with "409 of your colleagues at [...] are reading the Daily snapshot everyday." 2) Spammed me after I unsubscribed. They have 10 days under the CAN-SPAM Act, but their system should be sufficiently automated that they can unsubscribe me immediately.

Apparently, the ethics issue is with Owler, not CMC. I defer comments on Owler to those with willingness to investigate. However, I do not believe these comments apply to Colorado Mountain Club (Blog)  The climbing community to rife with disagreement.  I know the Colorado Mountain School (formerly Fantasy Ridge) - Topher sold me my first climbing shoes well before he graduated high school (if this is meaningless to you, ignore;  it is an experience and credibility comment)  . I don't know these folks but in looking at site, I see climbing technical issues that can be raised, but somone needs to document if they are actually doing something unethical or dangerous that I am missing before labeling them a bad site. I suspect the bad rating is Owler related, not otherwise.

It scrapes industry web pages for links. Web hosts aren't always happy about that. It uses crowd sourced opinions to group and categorize content - kinda like WoT. Once signed up, it offers content via email related to your search and opinions - That can lead to daily emails. Since you signed up, that's not really spam. all the negative comments I've seen are not related to the quality of the site, but more the opinion on receiving daily emails, or not like the way they scrape content. Ultimately owler seems to do what it states it does.

Today I received an unsolicited communication from Owler at my work address, an address that I've only shared with my peers and Microsoft. Prior to this email I had no idea Owler even existed, so I am certain that I have not subscribed to any communications. I'm not sure I can trust any company that starts sending me emails out of the blue without an explanation of why I'm receiving the mails and where my contact information was collected. Online searches show that there are a LOT of complaints about Owler spam, adding to the distrust.

The main issue I could have with Owler is that they do not appear to perform any actual investigation of republished data, or crowdsourced information, so the figures provided should always be taken with a grain of salt. I do not see any reason why they would not be child-safe. Other that that, they provide a valuable resource on the startup landscape, in some ways like Angelfire.

It makes no sense to me that Owler should have a poor child safety rating.  Owler sends information about companies or competitors that a user like me identifies / follows.  That information often includes news items, or product releases and social media activity by the target companies.  So if a user is seeing content not safe for children, it probably relates to the sites or companies that user has chosen to follow.  Owler depends on users to tell it who competes with who, and how companies are related or not.  The news it sends me about the competitors or companies in my industry that I've chosen to follow comes entirely from the Web.

Typical scrapper that hammers your website with their bot without asking for robots.txt - and even on the rare occasion that it does - it ignores it anyways. Why should website owners subsidize their sale of information via our own bandwidth? Not here - IP range blocked.

Rating changed to reflect recent changes. Twitter spamming has been ended. Automated scraping system. Targets users with claims they are worth lots of money.. The link I was sent was not even for my organisation. No verification is done, so all base profiles are not to be trusted.

Owler is an internet data extraction site that consolidates data to report on private companies and startups. This site provides accurate information (based on my knowledge of some of the companies they track) that is only available from much more expensive services or must be manually compiled. The criticisms I've read about Owler all stem from a criticism of the data extraction business model and claims of spamming. Spamming is not part of Owler's business model and I have neither been spammed, nor been offered spamming services, including email address.