Thumbtack now asking for personal information

F

firehawk

Veteran
I've had my company on thumbtack for many years now. Never landed a paying job from it.
Now they are asking for my personal information - full name, DOB, address etc... and will not let you quote bids anymore unless you do it.

What do you guys think about?
I suspect if I give all that, then I soon will be receiving even more junk mail from various people
 
Thumbtack is a race to the bottom. Don't give them your information. If that website dies it will do nothing but good for the industry.
 
That's kind of how I feel about it too. I get around a dozen "lead" emails a day which are almost entirely lousy paying jobs or rediculously cheap jobs. It seems sites like that just help build the current expectations of pay a little and get a whole lot
 
It's really killed lots of expectations in the market. I just delivered an estimate for a web commercial promo type deal for a local business, who of course used thumbtack in the past and were not entirely satisfied. But once they saw what a real price is for a decent video they thought it was extremely expensive (when it was about market average). Back to thumbtack for them!
 
I just put in my P.O. box and limited info and it was accepted. I have worked a lot for certain areas from Thumbtack but I agree, they are reinforcing the wrong attitudes.
 
Unless they go to the trouble of confirming the validity of all your information, you can probably get away with lying about some of the information.
 
It's not a great site for sure, but no worse than of the others that do the same thing and cater to the same market (e.g. mostly inexperienced video production clients with no idea of what things should properly cost or even what good quality actually is, with the occasional exception who doesn't know any better than to use such a site to find their vendors). I have gotten a few things off there that were decent over the years but the detractors here are mostly right. Sometimes you are messaged directly or invited to quote, in which case it's free (which is the only time I quote) but typically you have to pay just to quote, which I think is crazy.
 
Doing business is one thing, asking for personal information is another. They don't need to know your birthday; they probably want your personal information so that they can sell it. I lied to FaceBook about my birthday to prevent my personal information from being data mined. Under normal circumstances I'd say that lying is unethical, but I also don't think you should give out your personal information to people who don't need it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top