Spam Study
from the save-us dept
Since we’ve been discussing spam a lot here, I thought the following study was interesting. Apparently people feel that shopping online leads to getting spam and that companies are not able to do a good job regulating themselves. Thus, there is strong support for government stepping in to regulate on the whole spam issue. All I know is if I get one more printer ink offer or amazing offer to spy on my neighbors I think I’m going to explode.
Comments on “Spam Study”
Offers
Just yesterday, I got an offer to spy on my neighbor’s printer ink.
(Feeling silly today)
Re: Offers
This type of article is exactly why people don’t trust the Net. The media has constantly blown up stories about how privacy is an issue, and equating those privacy issues to ecommerce players. I’d be willing to bet an important part of my anatomy that it’s not the Buy.com’s of the world selling my email address. It’s my posting on newsgroups, or being listed in public directories. It would be corporate suicide for major businesses to ever be in the business of selling their customers names.
Re: Re: Offers
Yeah, I definitely agree with you on this one. The online retailers are definitely not the cause of spam. In fact, I use different email addresses to make sure that no one is selling my name, and none of those have ever come back to haunt me. The ones I get spam at are the public ones that are scraped off of pages (mainly techdirt). In fact, the majority of the spam I receive is actually sent to the automated “subscribe” address for Up-To-Date. I think it’s especially silly when they claim that that address “opted-in” which is impossible, because it’s no one’s address…