Online Shopping Cart Company Fined For Selling User Data

from the and-the-users? dept

Many e-commerce websites use online shopping carts provided by third-party suppliers. This makes perfect sense. There's no need to reinvent the wheel -- especially if you're a fairly small retailer. However, one such shopping cart system then took the customer data from all of the customers across all the sites they served... and sold all the data to telemarketers and junk mailers, even if the users clearly checked a "do not bug me" option. The problem is that the "do not bug me" option only applied to the e-commerce sites. The shopping cart company claims they're entirely separate, and they own all the data used in their shopping carts. The fact that they own and can sell the data is then buried in a long agreement that no one would read. Most people obviously would have no idea that the shopping cart company was different and had different policies than the e-commerce sites. The FTC has fined the company $9,000 and made them promise to be more forthcoming about selling data. However, that doesn't help the approximately 1 million people who had their data sold to junk marketers.

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