Hey sir 100% agree. Plain and simple, this just shouldn't happen. Furthermore I'm not aware of any individual at our org who would endorse such a behavior willingly- its a 'no no' of the highest order that we take deadly serious.

Total transparency and update: Initial investigation seems to indicate that this may not be occurring when external stakeholder comment for the first time as originally indicated, but rather a bug occurring when those first time users get @mentioned by another user in a comment. Currently the @mention is the top suspected culprit that we believe may be causing the subscribe flag to get accidentally thrown on a limited number of accounts. Thats the primary suspect as of right now. Still investigating to 100% rule out anything else here before I give the deeper dive report and all clear.

Will continue to post updates here as I have them from the team so that y'all have complete visibility here.

Again totally not intentional... and totally not excusable. Deeply sorry for this. Humble pie is a dish we're eating today. Thank you truly to the entire community for keeping us accountable and pushing on us here. More to come...

UPDATE: Please see my topmost post on this. The issue ended up not being the @mentioning culprit as initially surmised, but rather a bug in the way Segment was passing data to our Hubspot system. Lots more details there. Thanks for your patience!

This comment strikes me as a bit condescending, as if "designers" were some kind of morally superior uber-humans.

Designers make bad decisions all the time. I don't think it projects a very good image of designers as a profession when the first reaction to somebody screwing up is “surely it couldn't have been a designer!”.