The Problem Of White Collar Spam
from the it's-not-just-the-scammers dept
While the Direct Marketing Association wants you to believe that spam is only spam if it's fraudulent, the NY Times is pointing out that "white collar spam" - or spam that is sent out by legitimate companies is getting progressively worse. The problem is that legitimate companies collect email addresses, and then some clueless marketing person realizes they can make a few extra bucks selling their lists. Sometimes these are lists where the person has unwittingly checked off a fine print agreement to "receive marketing offers", but often, companies just ignore their own privacy policies. Plus, there are hundreds of email list brokers - all claiming to offer "opt-in" lists, but there's no way to verify that, so many are less than honest about it. Besides, as the various lists get passed around, no one knows where the email addresses came from or what they were approved for. To make matters even worse, you have companies going out of business, and having their lists sold, where old privacy policies are completely ignored and former employees who take their own copies of email lists and sell them to anyone who wants them. Basically, if you've ever given a company an email address, it's probably been passed around, and there's not much you can do about it. The companies claim that there's nothing they can do, because there's no way to know which email addresses are valid "opt-in" addresses. That's a lie, of course. There's an easy way to only use real opt-in email addresses - and that's the get the email addresses yourself, and to keep an audit trail showing that the user signed up and confirmed that they wanted to be on the list. If you can't show an audit on an opt-in user, then you shouldn't be sending email to that user.
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
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Been there....
I just turned away and wimpered.
This is not the first time this has happened to me as a Web Developer, my old boss - who hated spam, and made us put all sorts of rediculous anti-spam measures on our website, asked me to create a database of our customers so we could add Email spam to our repetoire of fax spam!
Of course, the fax spam never worked properly - for some unknown reason, the modems were always breaking, ahem.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Use disposal addresses
I use SpamEx, but there are at least four main players with such services, and I read last week that Yahoo! will begin offering such a service soon. At that point the best spam management option to-date may start to become mainstream.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The Problem of White Collar Spam
So, the real problem of spam of any kind is the entity that created it has grown into a generator of public nausea of monstrous proportions that must not be allowed to continue.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]