Over on her Word to the Wise blog, Laura Atkins talks about what happens when a company doesn't abide by their own published privacy policies. They occasionally sell addresses, and an address you give out ends up on a bunch of various spam lists.
Sadly, this has happened to me, too, from time to time. If I give you an email address, and two weeks later, I start getting advertisements for Canadian Pharmacies or Credit Repair Offers, stuff I did not explicitly sign up for, then something is wrong.
ISPs notice this. I think of it as "recipient dilution." Everybody who dared to submit an email address to site X is suddenly now getting a bunch of unrelated, unwanted mail. All of those senders suffer; they're easy to find because they're all hitting the same spam traps, have the same bounce rates, and are garnering the same spam complaints.
Over on Spam Notes, Venkat Balasubramani questions whether or not privacy policies are worth the paper they're printed on. He highlights a recent case where the court didn't seem to care one tiny bit that a company significantly violated its own stated privacy policy. That might suggest to you that it's legal to ignore your privacy policy -- but it's important to keep in mind that privacy policy violations lead to deliverability disaster, even if no law is violated.
Don't be one of those senders, if you want your mail to be delivered to the inbox. If you participate in buying or selling lists, you're setting yourself up for a delivery problem that I can't fix.
Sadly, this has happened to me, too, from time to time. If I give you an email address, and two weeks later, I start getting advertisements for Canadian Pharmacies or Credit Repair Offers, stuff I did not explicitly sign up for, then something is wrong.
ISPs notice this. I think of it as "recipient dilution." Everybody who dared to submit an email address to site X is suddenly now getting a bunch of unrelated, unwanted mail. All of those senders suffer; they're easy to find because they're all hitting the same spam traps, have the same bounce rates, and are garnering the same spam complaints.
Over on Spam Notes, Venkat Balasubramani questions whether or not privacy policies are worth the paper they're printed on. He highlights a recent case where the court didn't seem to care one tiny bit that a company significantly violated its own stated privacy policy. That might suggest to you that it's legal to ignore your privacy policy -- but it's important to keep in mind that privacy policy violations lead to deliverability disaster, even if no law is violated.
Don't be one of those senders, if you want your mail to be delivered to the inbox. If you participate in buying or selling lists, you're setting yourself up for a delivery problem that I can't fix.
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