Citibank Emails Information To People Without Checking Validity Of Email Address
from the not-so-bright dept
You would think that, these days, companies would be extra careful when it came to privacy issues - especially in the financial world. Citibank, however, didn't seem to think through their latest marketing effort. They hired a company to "find" the email addresses of their customers, and then hired another company to spam those people without verifying that the people actually were Citibank customers. In other words, if the original email scraping company thought that Joe Smith (A) was really Joe Smith (B) - a Citibank customer, Joe Smith (A) suddenly received an email from Citibank saying he could receive financial info about Joe Smith (B) via email. Probably not the smartest move by Citibank, though, they don't seem all that apologetic about it. All they say is that the "wording" may have been misleading.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team