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eBay : Where "Opt-out" Means "Keep Trying"
<Quoted letter follows>
Dear cadrys,
Several times a month, eBay sends out valuable email communications with news, offers and special events that help you buy and sell. Unfortunately, we have noticed that an error occurred during your registration process that prevented you from receiving these communications. Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes", which means that unlike other eBay members, you're not receiving these types of communications.
We'd like to resolve this problem quickly and efficiently. Therefore, on 1/8/01, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of "yes" to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community. However, we want you to choose your Notification Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until 1/23/01. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Notification Preferences. You will, however, continue to receive certain administrative emails that are part of executing your eBay transactions.
<Quote ends>"
Maybe you're right, maybe the preferences were destroyed after the registration process. If that's the case, though, eBay is lying about it, because they say in the email that the error occurred during the registration process. I guess we get a choice of lies: either they lied when they offered the users the opt-out choice, or they're lying now about the reason for which they've reset the users' preferences to "Spam Lover".
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Plus there are still some people without fat pipes. Add in the cumulative time it takes to download all that shit.
Then there are those times when we're concentrating on code or whatever over on screen four, but expecting an important email. Whatever indicates that you've got mail, so you break your concentration, switch to screen one and read "Get rich quick by flogging your dog in the privacy of your own home" or some such shit. It would be as if some dirtbag kept knocking on your door, at random, for no reason, every freaking day, for ever and ever.
Add it all up. That's a lot of time stolen from our lives by bastards who will never have to answer for it. Maybe I've just been online for too many years but I could murder a spammer in cold blood this morning and sleep well tonight, knowing that I had done the human race a favor.
For all of that, when people you know use bad email etiquette, it's even more annoying.
Got a beef? Plug a name into the Bizarre Rumour Generator!
In fact, eBay had more than a drive die. They had a whole mess of problems lately; see the message at that link beginning with "Letter from Meg". Entire systems and their spares all going crunch.
I've got those options all off at eBay as well, and I've just gone and checked and they're still all off, and I've received no mail. Hey, maybe they were telling the truth! But that doesn't make a very good story.
My favorite part is the bit about eBay not having a right to do that. IDT"right"MWYTIM.
Looks like somebody forgot a WHERE statement and updated everybodies colums with a Y instead of what they used to be ..
...
Nice way to try and cover it tho
He's having a nice time at work.
_14k4
webmaster@860.org
http://www.poorheart.com
If it looks like pink meat, smells like pink meat, then it must be spam!
Here's my (somewhat edited) original post to a 'well known' anti-spam list about my experience with this. For the non-spam-savvy, note also the first line of the spam itself (last line of this message) - a "web bug" tracking link which will notify ebay if the spam was received - without the user's permission. We should not put up with spam from big companies (mainsleaze) any more than we should spam from 'make money fast' fly-by-night spammers. This professional bulk mailer (not ebay) is already listed on ORBS.
n f=1&Unique_ID=eBay_conf_user' BORDER=0 HEIGHT=1 WIDTH=1>
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 10:00:16 -0800
Sender: Spam Prevention Discussion List [munge]
From: Julian Haight <[munge]>
Subject: SPAM: ebay's "preferences campaign"
I just got a response to a spam report I filed because ebay "forgot" my no-spam preferences again. I thought it was interesting that attached to the "fix it yourself" form letter (we won't stop spamming until you change your prefs back again) was this little note, apparently added by someone at the bulk-for-hire site as they forwarded the complaint on to ebay:
"Another spam complaint from the preferences campaign."
I found it particularly interesting that they are referring to it as the "preferences campaign". This is probably old news to most, but I don't think ebay can really deny they're spamming.
Happy new year all - I think 2001 will be the year of mainsleaze.
-=Julian=-
(spamcop owner/admin)
For reference:
[snip to avoid slashdot's lame "lameness filter"]
..
From: eBay SPAMMED Mail <spam@ebay.com>
..
If you would not like to receive notices about special offers, promotions, and other such notices please change your notification preferences. To do this first go to this web page and login:
..
James P. S.
eBay Senior Customer Support Representative
..
Original Message Follows:
Another spam complaint from the preferences campaign.
From: Julian Haight [mailto:julian.14567850@spamcop.net]
To: abuse@ann0.com; postmaster@ann0.com
..
[snip to avoid slashdot's lame "lameness filter"]
..
Subject: Important Information from eBay
From: "eBay Announcements"
..
We'd like to resolve this problem quickly and efficiently. Therefore, on 12/19/00, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of "yes" to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community.
..
<BODY> <IMG SRC='http://adfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/tr/*munge*?co
I just love a good post that generalizes every /. geek out there. Thanks pal. Never mind that I *don't* go to the movies, *won't* buy DVDs until the DeCSS fiasco is over, and I will stop using eBay if I get that email. No big loss for me, I have plenty of other "shiny new things" to keep me occupied. Don't try to make yourself feel better about your own weak will by claiming everyone suffers from the same affliction.
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
If this happened again in another couple months or even in the next year, I think there would be cause to complain, but balancing their desire for e-mailing you against your desire not to get it, this seems like a reasonable approach. They want to mail you, they warn you they'll start, if it's important enough, you set your preferences to stop it again.
It's fun to bash, but remember all the companies that change policies or release data without giving any warning. Consider this one a victory for corporate responsibility.
XDG
Hmm... when I got mine today it sounded like they thought there was some error in their system that didn't even present me the option of opting-out and so defaulted to 'no'.
/. story
/. doesn't think that is news?
To be honest, I don't remember - it was a while ago that I first signed up. If I did opt out, and now I have a couple weeks to opt-out again - it's not really that big a deal, is it? It would be different if they re-sent every e-mail they think I was supposed to get over the last six months. They reset my prefs to receive, they are going to hold off until 1/23 to start sending mail, and it took me a total of 15 seconds to go to my prefs page and turn them all off again.
How exactly is this evil enough to be a
Egghead sent me a nice mail saying noone every really got my credit card even though 7300 people have reported fraud on their cards after the egghead crack, but
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Whatever you do, please do not respond to spam via email. I noticed your page gave other options like customer service numbers and faxes, and that's great. But if you reply to spam, it just confirms that there's a real, live person reading this email and gaurantees that you'll be kept on the list.
Furthermore, many times spammers spoof addresses, and some innocent sap could get your flaming responses. A lot of good that would do...
I have recieved the same email many others have, from ebay about the offers they did not sign up for, and I too shall terminate my E-Bay account. i encourage others to do the same until E-Bay Realizes that when you opt-out, they should stay the hell out. If incidences like this are allowwed to continue, we may be forced to read page after page of junkmail we decided not to get in the first place. This is not the future I look forward to. Even if you do not recieve this email, unite with the others and boycott E-Bay until an official apology is made.
What the fsck are you talking about? Did I say information wants to be free? Have you found postings to that effect on my user page? Idiot.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
01/07/01
Dear Floridian Voter,
Every four years, the Government holds an election. Unfortunately, we at the Democratic Party have noticed that an error occurred during your voting process which may have prevented you from voting Democrat. Your Voting Preference was "Republican" rather than "Democrat", which means that Al Gore was not receiving your vote.
We'd like to resolve this problem quickly and efficiently. Therefore, on 11/8/00, we began reinterpreting all your Voting Preferences to the standard default of "Democrat" to put you in line with the rest of our community.
However, we want you to choose your Voting Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until the next election. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Voting Preferences. Your November Vote will, however, continue to be counted for Al Gore in our continuing recount effort.
Ebay's problems: EBay Crashes for Nearly 11 Hours - January 4, 2001, 5:19 AM PST .
Elephants are not camels.
Won't work. Most respectable mailing lists, unlike ebay, use double opt-in. Ebay is one of those that seem to use double opt-out :)
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
oops, I forgot the where clause, oh well it must have been a registration error
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
AOL and a few other places have been doing this for years. I mention AOL because, unlike eBay, they are equally famous for not informing the users of the changes made.
Egghead sent me a nice mail saying noone every really got my credit card even though 7300 people have reported fraud on their cards after the egghead crack, but /. doesn't think that is news?
The crucial question is whether 7300 out of several million is out of line with typical rates of reported credit card fraud. I understood the Egghead letter to be saying that it wasn't out of line, and that therefore there's no evidence yet of a problem.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
And later... "Thank you for letting us know whether or not you would like to have sex. Your preference has been recorded. Please note that it may take 14 days for us to decide whether or not we heard you. In the meantime, let's screw."
Doesn't it seem that as companies grow larger and larger, they feel they can be more and more liberal with thier customers and expect to get away with it?
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world; unreasonable people persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves
But who can blame them. Most of the tech stock market and the brand new corporate websites are taking a severe beating on The Street. Now is the time for desperate measures, because most of the dot-coms out there won't last through the end of 2001. So what Ebay did is completely typical of the current dot-com struggle to stay alive.
So what do we do as consumers? Well, like Smith&Wesson (who thought trying to implement an unpopular, at least with their customers, child safety lock on all new handguns they made) would solve their problems with both the pro-guns and anti-guns groups, they instead ended up hurting themselves by doing so. They disregarded what their paying customer's really wanted and needed from their company. Their sales this year were down (15% or more, I think), and it was because most of their customers didn't agree with their actions.
So in regards to Ebay, we don't have to go marching around Washington all day and night to get the point out that spam is bad. Just quietly sign off of Ebay and go elsewhere. They'll get the picture soon enough, or they'll lose profits quickly. (And in this dot-com survival game right now, not getting the picture soon enough results in no more company).
if you read the privacy policy, it'll become very apparent to you that they are not in buisiness in the interest of the customer... and it has always been that way.
.e.
www.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
Yes, I understand what eBay did. However, the result of these actions are just one e-mail message to delete and a little bit of time spent setting their profile back. Sure, it wasn't right, but eBay wouldn't dare try it again. Especially since most of the users who got the e-mail will just revert to their original mail-box friendly settings.
I don't see why it's worth a Slashdot story and so much venom. It would be a bigger issue if every user of eBay was going to be spammed into oblivion effective immediately. You won't recieve eBay spam until 1/23.
Now, if they do it again, I'll be happy to change my song. Another eBay spam and I will personally be the first to suggest crucifixion of the genius behind this situation.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
First off, they're giving you time to re-opt-out of the mailings. They are not sending any mail to you (despite re-setting all of the choices to "yes") until you have passed the date by which you can set your choices back to "no". That's fair warning.
Second, even if they pull this on you every month, you still have a choice of opting out, and besides, that's one email instead of the 50-100 you would have gotten per month if you would have kept the options set to "yes".
I can deal with this. Even monthly. eBay is THE auction site on the Internet, and to date I have had 0 bad experiences with them (one idiot that sold me a hands-free kit for my mobile phone pocketed 80% of what I paid for shipping and then sent my item in the slowest, cheapest manner possible, but that's my only beef; every other experience I've had with eBay has been stellar).
Spam mail sucks, and I'd like to see it go away. However, my anti-spam measures are not quite as extreme as those of others. I do not kid myself into thinking I can just opt out of junk email any more than I think I can opt out of junk snail mail. Unless you pick up and move, then don't leave any kind of trail leading to where you went, it's impossible to shake this stuff. I can fight it and get pissed off over and over again, or I can meet these spammers half way and control the flood.
I'll opt for control.
I have all of my preferences set to "NO" on eBay. If I get this email today (like a few other people that I talk to have) I will be suspending my account as well...
They altered your preferences, and started sending you unsolicited mail? That's got to be against some privacy/spam law somewhere.
Alternatively, why not complain to SpamCop? It is technically unsolicited mail...
they're affraid that the preferences you set initially did not actually reflect you, the voter ^H^H^H^H^H^H^customer's true intention. so they're going to give you the opportunity to to try again and again until the selections they^H^H^H^H^H you really intended is assured. it's all in the interest of fairness of course.
Not me. The cost-value ratio of selling stuff on eBay still continues to be the best I've ever seen. I've reached dozens of buyers for used computer equipment easily and cheaply.
You have to the weigh the sheer convenience of getting good money for your stuff (without going through a middleman) vs. a single irritating email. If their service is strong enough, which it is, I can let this one go.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Yes, Your Honor, She said "NO!" to all my come-ons.
But most of the other girls I have asked have said YES, so her answer MUST have been an error.
So I just put her in line with the rest of the community...and well, you know
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I got one also. I replied with a very nasty letter and a threat to report them to MAPS and ORBS. If I receive anything else from them, I will definitely stop using them and happily report them to the blackhole lists.
When people say "don't send me any shit", it means "don't send me any shit". I guess they don't really know what that means.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I have a problem with our terms here. We need to stop calling this spam. It's not spam because you gave them your email address. True, you asked them not to send you any email, but you still gave them your address, knowing that if the situation warranted it they would be able to send you mail. Well, the situation warranted it (in their minds) so they sent you mail.
It's annoying, but it's not spam. It's just you doing business with a company who sometimes conducts business in a way you find irritating.
That's very different from someone you don't know mining your email address to send you mail on topics they have no idea whether or not you will be interested in, purely for the sake of profiting on the 1/100,000th customer.
This is kind of like when that Hot Babe opts out of a torrid sexual encounter at your place. You wait five minutes, quaff another brewsky, and ask again.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Dear cadrys,
Several times a month, eBay sends out valuable email communications with news, offers and special events that help you buy and sell. Unfortunately, we have noticed that an error occurred during your registration process that prevented you from receiving these communications. Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes", which means that unlike other eBay members, you're not receiving these types of communications.
We'd like to resolve this problem quickly and efficiently. Therefore, on 1/8/01, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of "yes" to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community. However, we want you to choose your Notification Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until 1/23/01. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Notification Preferences. You will, however, continue to receive certain administrative emails that are part of executing your eBay transactions
I Scott Larson, really do not appearicate resetting someones prefs without their permission, the whole point of user prefs is to make your own decisions about what spam mail you do and do not want. please contact me on your resolution with this issue, what you plan on doing in the future, because if this is the attiude your company has on users and their prefs then I do not want to be apart of it and will be terminating my account. If I do not receive a response in one week, I will be contacting your company by other means.
Sincerly,
Scott Larson
Sonic solutions
Trinsic@cubedd.com
They evidently changed mine without even giving me the courtesy of an email about it. I just checked and found all of my prefs set to "Yes" (at least the spam-related stuff.) I just love the line that popped up after I submitted the changes: "Your preferences have been saved. Please note that changes to your preferences may take approximately 14 days to be reflected in our communication to you." Still, where else can you go? No other auction house has as much stuff for sale or as many potential buyers for whatever you are trying to sell. :|
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
-- Wherever you go, there you are. BB
You know, if I were a troll, I'd be in hog heaven. this is typical slashdot knee-jerk BS.
I finally signed up for an ebay account a few weeks ago.
And I didn't receive this e-mail.
Is it possible, just for a second, that, God forbid, they're telling the truth, and some mysterious "error" DID occur when you signed up?
Imagine this: monthly (annual, bi-annual, first, whatever) audit shows that for the users that created accounts from the period of A to B, there is an abnormal number of users who selected to recieve no communications at all. After a bit of checking it turns out that sure enough, there was a problem. So now you have this block of thousands of users whose communications preferences you don't know. What do you do?
Ignore it? Yeah, the PHBs will love that.
Send an e-mail explaining that there was an error, and ask them to review their 'communication preferences'? Won't work, because folks like my Mom will get lost, quickly.
Send an e-mail explaining that there was an error, set them back to defaults, and apologize? This, to me, seems like the best option, because if you turned the settings off, then you obviously wanted them off, and will go through the trouble to turn them off again. Unlike my mom, who doesn't know one way or the other.
Suck it up, folks.
J.J.
Not only that in most states if you own your house YOU pay to have your trash picked up. So there wasting your money.
If even twenty or so /. ers set up anonymous accounts and sent a steady stream of
"You maybe receiving this email in error. If you do not want to receive this message, please delete and hope you don't get it again."
to ebay support for a day or two - just enough to cost them a little money by tying up their tech resources, not a DoS attack - do you think they would get the msg.? We do have legal ways of fighting back...
If I didn't love you, I'd hate you...
I find it more odd that you question why people make their own choices.
--- oops
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe
UCE, although we do object to the use of our product
image in association with that term. Also, if the term is
to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to
distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should
be used with all uppercase letters.
it isn't junk mail. junk mail is unsolicited, ie you had no previous business contact with the company. Even though you said you would rather not receive mail from them, they can still (legally) send you stuff.
For one thing, people, especially geeks, are extremely loath to admit their own powerlessness and inefficacy in a situation. Even the passing gesture of non-consumption, as inauthentic and short-lived as it is, seems like a response of some sort. The fact that most of us are essentially at the whim of the big players of the system in which we choose to participate is an uncomfortable one.
The second reason is political - the libertarian credo is that the market will resolve all such behaviors. Admitting that the market couldn't do so in any given situation would be a sort of sacrilige, and could lead to such horrors as the European privacy legislations, trade practice controls and other frightening instances of useful public policy.
they slam your settings to get you to visit their site. This happened to me on Amazon as well and I have seen it happen to others. Instead of spewing they could send a notice that their records indicate that you have not visited their site in X days and ask to click on link to verify your continued interest and keep you in the DB.
However the marketing machine does not want to give you the opportunity to be removed from their DB they want to keep you and get you to visit their site regularly. So they send spew, and send you on a goose chase around their site to try and find where to unsubscribe. Hopfully you will give up before you luck into the place where they have hidden the unsubscribe stuff, only to find that you need a password for an account that you [did not create/don't remember] to reset your preferences.
After the third try, I sent them a cease and desist order informing them that further non-administrative messages sent to any of my addresses (and listed said addresses) from them or any of their "affiliates" would be read at a rate of $20 per line at 60 char (max) per line including headers. And that any bill for such not paid in full by 30 days after submission, would be followed by small claims action as well as steps being taken to submit them to global spam filtering solutions. Included my full name and contact info and noted the date, county, and state.
I recieved a personal response that my addresses had been removed within hours! I have not heard from them again nor will I ever do business with them again.
As far a E-bay goes, I do not find it usefull in any way, unless I was one of those persons who will drive 20 miles to save a dime. I'm sure there are exceptions such as hobbyists and collectors who are willing to spend a great deal of time rooting around, dealing with the spew from E-bay, getting their address harvested by lurking lusers, dealing with the fraud and other pitfalls just to find a deal on that one unique item in a million pieces of shit. (Ah, the thrill of the hunt!)
Say it with me... "E-bay Sucks! Spamazon Bite me!"
Rick B.
I haven't received this message from eBay, and I opted out of virtually all their message types. I can certainly see that someone who registered back when they were rolling out then rolling back their new software might have registered some preferences that the database can't deal with.
I buy a LOT on eBay, and I sell occasionally, too. I've got a good feedback rating, and they haven't seen fit to fuck with me yet.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
I am incensed that ebay did this. If I get a single ebay type ad from anyone I'm calling them if I can find a number on their site.
In the unlikely chance there was actually an error, ebay should have given warning of the change to allow for confirmation that my settings were in order.
Main difference: snail-mail spam has been pretty much steady in volume for a decade or so now. That's because it costs the sender to send it. Not as much as a regular letter, no, but it still costs so they can't send out unlimited amounts of it.
E-mail spam, OTOH, doesn't cost them a dime to send, and the volume keeps growing every month. Why not, after all there's no reason to not send it, no cost to sending it to people who don't want it. I want my mailbox to be usable.
Of course, some filters do help. For example, one generates a permanent transient delivery error on any mail that isn't addressed to me. That makes a lot of the spam the spammer's problem, but I still have to dispose of a couple dozen pieces every day that get through.
Who cares about eBay's source of revenue? Is that my problem? Even if the ads were their only source of revenue (which it isn't), your argument amounts to corporate welfare.
Imagine this: I offer you a free ice cream cone. As part of the offer, I give you the option to choose whether you want to give me your car. Like any sane individual, you say "No, you can't have my car, not for a stupid ice cream cone." I then decide I really need the money from selling your car, so I just take it.
According to your logic, you should accept this treatment because stealing your car is my only source of revenue. The point I'm trying to make is twofold: First, a company's business plan and revenue model are not the customer's responsibility. Second, a customer's personal information is something of value. If a company says they are not going to sell your personal information, but then does it anyway, they have stolen something from you. You can tolerate it if you want to, but the rest of us have every right to complain if we don't like it.
my $0.02 (US, or about $0.025 Canadian)
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Exactly. There unspoken attitude is that that "no doesn't really mean no" and you're not "normal" if you don't want to recieve email advertisements. Like they said (italics mine): Therefore, on 1/8/01, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of 'yes' to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community" Great. Is this the marketing dept.'s great idea? Peer pressure? What's next? "e*bay: If you don't like ads, you're a freaking Commie!"? Oh, how gracious of them to notify you before they change the default preferences you asked for! It's the same ol' rule of CYA they're practicing here, folks.
--M.
His show really whipped a donkey's ass, incidentally.
--
Anyone else think this sounds like spam? Has anyone who received reported it as such?
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It must be true, since I got an email from them that started out "as one of our best customers we'd like to offer you ... blahblahblah...".
The only time I ever visited their site was when I followed a direct link to:
BadKitty stuff.
Is this the line with blindfolds, cigarettes and last requests? Is there a drummer rolling out a slow, measured beat?
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
But I think part of the point is that "wrong" was not defined in terms of what the user might want, but what eBay would want, without thought of the user. It seems unlikely (to me anyway, but I don't think I'm unreasonable in this belief) that if the error had been the other way (people who didn't want email accidentally getting the "send me mail" bit set) that eBay would have sent an email, taken any action, or even acknowledged the problem. I bet they'd even lie about the existence of the problem, if some observant user(s) turned it up.
The problem isn't that they're out to make money - that's a fine goal. The problem is that they are willing to ignore consumer benefit and do things like send spam and invade privacy to do it, and they don't spend time in prison for it.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I think the actual meaning of that e-mail is not that your selection of "no" is an error but rather that the standard defaults (which should have been all yes) were set to no for some reason when you filled out the form. Since most people get sucked into spam by ignorance of the option to disable it, they assumed that you should've been ignorant and gotten sucked into spam as well, except that they made a mistake with the defaults, and therefore are now correcting it. It's either that or they're trying to make up a lame excuse to put everyone on their spam list...
I just went back to ebay to re-opt-out, this is what they sent me...
"Thank you for letting us know which types of eBay communications you'd like to receive."
"Your preferences have been saved. Please note that changes to your preferences may take approximately 14 days to be reflected in our communication to you."
14 days... doesn't that seem a bit much for an online service? I could understand 24 hours maybe, but 14 days??? I suppose they have to snail mail each of there departments just to make sure.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
"Breach of Trust"?
I hate to sound Troll-ish, but what are you doing trusting a corporation like eBay in the first place?
Right now, there's no evidence that this was done with malice. It seems like there is malice from the outside, but who knows what the person who set this plan into action was thinking.
Like I've said, when they do it for a second time, despite user uproar, then they're evil. This is a minor inconvience, like a speeding ticket, a headache, or a "News Flash" during your favorite show and probably shouldn't provoke you to cancel your eBay account. Despite their current stupidity stint, I still think that the services they provide are top-quality, and I'm not going to inconvience myself further by throwing that service away just because of a single bad decision on the company's part.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
...cdnow.com, where I clicked all of the "opt out of spam" boxes, and yet continue to get weekly updates I care not about. Mental note: complain to the humans there.
Dear eBay customer,
Our service allows netizens to bid for various items via auction. This allows them to buy rare items if they place a bid higher than other users' bids. Unfortunately, we have noticed that you have not placed a bid in the past few weeks.
Effective immediately, we have placed and won numerous bids using the credit card information we have on your file. You shall be billed for them within the month. We hope you enjoy using eBay!
-eBay Support
------------
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
eBay won't suffer from this, and I wouldn't be surprised if you frequent their site again within a few months.
/.
If he is anything like me, no, he won't. When Amazon decided to do their BS patent work against bn.com guess who has gotten every dime of my internet business since then. Right, bn.com.
If eBay pulls that shit on me, not that they will since my account has been inactive for over a year, they'll get the same treatment. I want computer equipment I can go to Yahoo! or Egghead or several other difference places to buy and sell. There are loads of specialized auction sites out there that one can quite happily not go to eBay.
Passively support the use of Microsoft products? Uhm, well, let's see. This post is composed in Opera under Linux running KDE2. Oh, and it is IDing itself as Mozilla 4.76, not IE.
Me thinks the "weak-willed" comment wasn't directed at technophiles in general, but one in particular named "MAJ Rantage" on
Simply put there are some things you do NOT let slide. And calling that spamming a "Service" is one of them.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
Didn't realize that Katherine Harris was eBay's CIO.
--
--
Intelligence is definitely a recessive trait.
"Unfortunately, we have noticed that an error occurred during your registration process..."
They basically legitimized data alteration without permission from the user.
Cracking is also alteration of data without permission from the user so where does the line get drawn?
I just yesterday got a shiney new card to replace the one that I had used on Egghead before no strangeness on it but the bank just sent it out anyway. Pretty cool of the bank so yea they (egghead) at some point reported the problem to the bank because I did not.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I was searching some news articles and apparently this has become somewhat of a hot topic on various news pages. There is an article, http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-201-4423010-0.htm l?tag=pt.abc.tech..ne_4423010, on cnet about it and it is on the ABCNews page.
Christ, another Slashdot troll. Who let you fuck heads onto of the Slashdot severs? Why don't you stagger off and write some whining little troll to your message board and leave the rest of the net alone. We don't give a shit about you.
Meow.
I also did NOT receive this email, however I went and checked my preferences at Ebay "just in case". Lo and behold, the fact that I didn't get the email is irrelevant, because all of my preferences have been reset.
I would suggest that everyone who is registered with Ebay check their preferences "just in case", as the absense of the email does not necessarily mean that your preferences were not changed.
First off, they're giving you time to re-opt-out of the mailings. They are not sending any mail to you (despite re-setting all of the choices to "yes") until you have passed the date by which you can set your choices back to "no". That's fair warning.
Second, even if they pull this on you every month, you still have a choice of opting out, and besides, that's one email instead of the 50-100 you would have gotten per month if you would have kept the options set to "yes".
I can deal with this. Even monthly
First: 'Re-opting-out' is not 'opting-out'. Opting-out is a one time thing. It's not fair warning unless they state on the page you opt-out that "This opting-out is only temporary. You will automatically be opted-in after X months".
Second: Would you still deal with it if is were biweekly? Or weekly? Or every other day? Or every day? Or every hour? Or every half hour?... Where does it stop?
"No" means "No". It does not mean "No, but, in a little, while assume I meant 'Yes' and tell me to say 'No' again if I *really* meant 'No' the first time".
Some of us don't want any unsolicited email in our inboxes. Even one a month is too much when you specifically asked not to get it. And then it's one a month from this company, one a month from that... It adds up. The worst attitude to take would be to simply bend over and say "It's only once a month. It's not so bad, really." There should be absolutely no tolerance for this kind of crap.
IMHO, the best thing to do in this situation is for everyone who got this email to reply to it and demand Ebay change the settings back to 'No' instead of giving Ebay the pleasure of having you visit their site.
Well, not that I question it, just trying to see it from eBay's point of view. I don't think that this is such a serious case that everyone is blowing it up to be. Some manager does a sql query, and sees a bunch of records 0'd out, and believes that it could have been caused by a system error.
Your "let-them-hit-delete" attitude totally misses the point. Not everyone is just exactly like you, you know. Many people, including most Europeans, pay per-minute or per-byte for Internet access. If I were one of these people, it would enrage me to have to buy additional connect time or transfer bandwidth just to get the headers of all the spam to delete it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Damn... I guess he's becoming a paranoid through osmosis. I mean, what with the constant barrage of comments about Foo Company's latest Bar a secret plot to overthrow the constitution, it seems likely that some of it would have rubbed of on Hemos.
I would imagine that he got an email, a story submission from someone who also got it, and then automatically assumed that the whole world must have, too.
Shit does happen to systems every day, and backups aren't always available/up-to-the-minute.
--Psi
Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.
No, they altered his preferences and have "given" him about 2 weeks to change them back before they go into effect. Underhanded and wrong, sure.
Come on, how can you question this?
After all, Ebay is, like, one of ten Dot-Coms that is financially viable and one of two that actually turns a profit.
How can you question their motives?
If ya want this Internet thing ta work, mebbe that's a part of it all.
Just as long as they don't send *me* a notice like that.
...[Eudora plays a bar from Ren and Stimpy's The Log]...
<sigh> Okay. Let's get them. A boycott is in order.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Just shift all the spam to Ebay or to Hotmail. All that is needed is another email address and then you can change your Ebay account to send mail to the new email address, and from there forward back to Ebay.
How horrible is this? Most places would've just turned the spam faucet back to full and left you wondering how it happened. I am sure at the IT level someone wrote it as I did, but by the time it got through the legal and marketing departments, it looks like the email you got. And just for reference, I have all my email prefs turned off as well and did not get this message, so it definitely isn't happening to all their users. If I had to guess, it was probably the early adopters that are getting these messages because their email choices probably changed somewhere along the way.
I don't disagree with you. I've given up on hotmail as the tidal wave of spam keeps rising and it's a shame. Hotmail was very convenient. The snail spam just pisses me off as I know that the same crap is delivered to all of the houses in the area and 99.999999% of them pitch it and off it goes to the dump. I'm not especially worried about the environment but that seems like a tremendous waste of resources for naught.
As worded, they're not doing anythiing illegal (though IANAL...just one in training). Look at the message again:
"Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes", which means that unlike other eBay members, you're not receiving these types of communications."
This is saying that when you registered, their registration form was screwed up, and the default settings on items was "no". Then they realize the error, and notice that, oddly enough, everything is set to "no". So they wonder (in pure self-interest, but if you expect anything more of them you're an idiot) if maybe you did accept the defaults blindly, in which case you'd be saying "yes" to everything. So they change the settings and send you an email, because if you really want everything set to "no", you can go reset everything how you want it.
And I know that this may seem an invasion of your privacy here, or a violation of their policies, but it really isn't; there was an error in the defaults, and you chose settings that were remarkably in line with what those erroneous defaults were. They can't find out if you wanted it some other way, because as the settings stand, they can't send you an email to find out. So they err on the side of finding out what really happened, change your settings so they can email you, and then email you.
Is this legal? Probably. Does it violate any policies anywhere? Probably not. Is it rife with possibilities for abuse? Yeah, and that sucks. Is it simply an act of blatant self-interest? Yeah, but they're a corporation and we're a capitalistic society. If you want them to do something else, become a business ethics consultant.
an error occurred during your registration process that prevented you from receiving these communications. Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes"
indicates that they didn't lose any data, how else would they know your preferences were originally "no"?
Why be complacent.
kevin
The same thing hapenned to me with the CD Universe break in awhile back. The only difference is that my bank, Bank Boston (Now Fleet) charged my account for 2-day rushing me a new card I didn't ask for. Not only that, but the card number in question was expired, but they replaced my _new_ card anyway. Check your next bank statement carefully.
Do you even know what ORBS is for? Theya re for open relays. Unless eBay is using an open relay to send their shit, ORBS doesn't want to hear your complaint. If you are gong to bitch, at least be smart enough to bitch at the right people.
No replies made to AC posts. Please log in.
One question: what have you done to stop junk mail from coming to your home? Anything?
If they reset your preferences, and THEN told you, isn't this a violation of their privacy policy? Presumably they did this because they had a really big customer looking to buy their email list, and so they reset everyone's preferences, sold the list, and then let people switch back. So can't Ebay get caught in a class action suit for contract violation?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The Direct Marketing Association's Mail Preference Service is like that. You have to tell them every few years to turn you off again.
It's typical for a business to do this. You sign up to use a service so they can say F&*# You anytime. I've seen places where you sign up, select NO for every piece of email and you still get a ton of crap in your mail box. We soend to much time typing "REMOVE" in an email just to keep our inbox free of junk. Suspend your account and go to another site
Just because you have tinted windows, it doesn't mean that I can't see you picking your nose..!!
Damn, there goes my theory. And I was so hoping to free our language of one awkward construct. Damn you, wolves, for injecting real-world complexity into a nice theory!
I do realize that they now have a program in which you never receive spam, but based on their past performance of customer service (I had to return CD's and DVD's numerous times even after choosing 'send nothing at this time' on their website) I cancelled their service. I understood the buy five CD's in two years commitment that signing up for their service entailed. I fulfilled my end of the bargain. I thought that once I had done so, and even before that I would have been shown so common decency and trust to not be bombarded with advertisement after advertisement.
In conclusion, buy things from the little guy who will give you the courtesy and respect that should be a given. Sure it may cost more, but you'll be showing the big corporations what still really matters to customers: CUSTOMER SERVICE!
I won't tell everyone that the only junk ya sell is stuff from EverQuest :) Seems like a good way to make money while playing games, you must have made $50 already!
--
Whatever you do, DON'T CLICK HERE!
I guess I'm going to have to "opt-out" of ebay entirely also.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Of course any individual is individually powerless (usually) against large corporations, governments, etc. But! You have to act as if you would if your lonely voice actually "mattered." You rely on the fact that if everyone acts similarly, your voice will be heard as a part of the group voice. I think your cynicism is just a bit too overboard...individual decisions do matter when they are examined in the context of the group response because they comprise the group response. I for one will continue to react to corporations as if the CEO was a personal friend. When millions of my closest friends and I act together it has the same effect.
I don't quite get why they decided to call this an error... It's not like some computer-gremlin magically adjusted all of the prefs to no. This is unfortunate, as these sorts of computer-gremlins would provide excellent excuses in the IT world...
We shouldn't *HAVE* to. If it were truly an error, why would the "correction" be to simply put us "in line with the rest of the eBay community"? Even if there *IS* nothing dirty going, the wording of their letter is damnable.
Not that I don't see how it's a stupid action, I just think you two are whining a little too much about it.
Why not complain now? Is this not the time to do so, BEFORE this is considered an acceptable practice? It's much harder to get rid of a practice once too many people (or companies) come to believe such a practice is acceptable.
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--
Intelligence is definitely a recessive trait.
In a way it's an end of innocence... we have given our names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses freely in the hopes of having a convenient place to order (or bid on, or sell) items online, and now that info is being abused.
What's the solution? Change your real info on those sites to bogus info (preferably to the mailing address of someone you don't like... *grin*).
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
When I got the message, I tried to find a way to deactivate my account. I can't find one. I was leary about signing on to start with becasue you agree to 'endemnify(sp?)' them. (this thing needs a spell checker) I've heard that means if they get sued and lose, YOU pay.
Pressing delete isn't that difficult but that's not why I fight spam. spam is theft of service, pure and simple. If someone sends me junk paper mail at least they've had to pay the USPS to bring it to me. However they can send me spam daily and, except for the one time cost of their spamware or the occasional account setup when their previous ISP kicked their spamming ass off, it costs them virtually nothing. It costs me. I pay for my access and even if one has an unlimited account, spam costs ISPs money and they do pass those costs on. How would you feel if the postal service delivered junk mail to you postage due? After all, you can just drop in into the trash...
Nice to see that selecting "no" is an error! :-) What's next then? Maybe they'll have a "no" option in the sign-up, but when you click "Submit", it'll come up with "Error - you failed to fully sign up for mailbox-clogging shite. Please try again."
Grab.
Firstly, it may be their server, but the rest of the network, the servers receiving the email and the email addresses are not theirs, and they have absolutely no right over those things. The boundary of their own network is the boundary of their "rights" (corporations don't have rights, but that's another story).
Secondly, this would be illegal under every single spam related bill ever introduced into Congress, even the DMA sponsored ones.
That is the funniest thing I've read all day.
I do this also. But there are some sites that don't get "user unknown" messages.
;), mailing list, your on for life. They will hunt you down!
There are two sites that have been sending my family email for over a year after I removed the alias. I even resorted to blocking the IP to the mail server, they then move the mail server.
Once your on the NSync (my daughter of course
--
--
As always, sneakemail becomes handy.
Sneakemail gives you the control over your email-address back - it lets you decide who gets to send you email. If somebody screws you (by sending spam, etc.), you just cancels that email-address.
Greetings Joergen
I'd buy that theory, except for all that "bringing you in line" crap... that doesn't sound very much like just replacing lost data...
While I remember opting out of everything (as the only good spam is that in a ziploc baggie with an m-150 firecracker tied to your enemy's light socket..), I never got this message.
They at least gave you time to reset your preferences- I get the impression that possibly a file system went corrupt, so they just reset everyone's profiles to their ideal profile, and then let you reset it if you wanted to (but prayed you let them send spam.)
Ebay's been good to me- recently had to appeal a non-paying bidder warning where the putz had an invalid email address and never contacted me, and they responded quickly, professionally, etc.
Anyone had any other bad experiences with Ebay itself? Or good ones? Almost everyone I know is fairly impartial...
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
I think that this is another of where some (gasp!) government regulation is required in regards to privacy on the Internet.
Government should not dictate specific policies in regards to what companies can or cannot do with customer information, but should require that companies doing business on the Web create their own policies and post them in "laymen's terms" on their Web site. Companies should be obligated to link to this policy as well as other Terms and Conditions on all pages of a site, or at the very least on all pages that request users for personal information or that allow a user to consummate a transaction. There should be some standard elements in regards to what a policy must address: use of cookies, "web bugs" and other automated tracking devices; how databases containing credit card numbers, e-mail addresses and other user-provided information are accessed, stored, and protected; to whom and under what circumstances this information can be provided to third parties.
I feel that the government should not dictate privacy policy, but must enforce whatever policy is generated by the private sector. For example, if General Motors were to not pay to repair a broken transmission on a 2000 Chevrolet with 5000 miles on it, the owner of that car could take GM to court. The owner would show the warranty stating that all major parts of the car were guaranteed for 3 years and 36,000 miles, and since the car was bought with the understanding that GM would honor this warranty for the stated term, the judge would order GM to pay for the required repairs. Yet the government has to this date done very little to make sure promises made by web sites like "we'll never sell or give out your e-mail address or credit card information" are upheld. Since promises like these are crucial to many online transactions, it is imperitive that the government step in and make sure these promises are kept and punish violators harshly enough to deter future violations.
Moreover, the government should give consumers recourse in the event that a company's privacy policy change. Customers should be given the right to insist that all information given to the company under previous privacy policies be removed on pain of serious fines and other penalties. Granted, enforcing such a regulation may be difficult, but many reputable companies would comply, and most others would follow if a violator were to receive a multi-million dollar fine from a judge.
Those who are completely against government regulation would say that consumers will reward those companies with the "best" privacy policies with their business and walk away from those with less favorable policies. If all companies were honest in their policies and these policies were permanent, then I would tend to agree with this viewpoint. However, without some recourse against a bait-and-switch tactic, consumers can get screwed. Sure, if a company suddenly says "the sale or distribution of all credit card information provided by our customers is fair game" in its privacy policy, people will probably stop shopping there. But what about everyone who bought from there before the change, under the assurance that their information would remain private? This company can still profit from these previous customers. Companies should not benefit from this type of exploitation, and without government intervention, there is little to ensure that these rogue companies can't benefit.
The Egghead.com case is probably one of the most underreported privacy violations in some time. This is why I said before that the goverment should not only require companies to state when they release information to third parties, but also to detail the procedures they use to protect the information from being stolen. While I don't know statistics in regards to how frequently fraud occurs on credit cards, I would tend to believe the fact that 7300 cardholders reported possible fradulent activity out of 1.5 million or so is a coincidence; this is a rate of roughly 0.5 percent. If these figures are true, then I would believe that this fraudulent activity would have occurred regardless of whether these people shopped at egghead.com. However, the more important fact is that many more people's cards could have been affected, and that something needs to be done to ensure that another similar (and possibly more damaging) incident does not occur with another major commerce site.
I hope that maybe as the more well-known companies like Amazon.com, egghead.com, and Ebay are coming under fire for these sorts of privacy issues, people will start to take notice and demand that new legislation be passed to outlaw this sort of fraud or that existing statues are interpreted by the courts to cover privacy promises on the Web in the way that warranties and other promises are covered in the physical world.
It's worth noting that this would be illegal under every single spam related bill ever introduced into Congress, even the DMA sponsored ones.
Didnt' AT&T do something like that? Where they call you about long distance and "no" seems to sound like "yes" over the amazingly staticy yet advertised by them as crystal clear phone? What's next? Smoking or non-smoking: oh, i'm sure you meant to say smoking, i'll just set you up there anyway.
I am !amused.
It's no big secret that Slashdot is a spammer haven, and the e-mail addresses here are quite often harvested. To try to cut down on the spam that I get, I put a "NOSPAM" in my e-mail address.
E-Bay sent a single message to its users who didn't want constant updates. Sure, it's an inconvience, but we're talking about a single e-mail message. If I were to remove the "NOSPAM" from my e-mail address, my incoming message queue size would increase exponentially.
You said it yourself, "post with your real email address and let us spam you". "Us" doesn't sound like the single message that E-Bay sent out. I don't agree with what E-Bay did, but it's not like they flooded your Inbox, cancelled your credit card, and killed your houseplants.
It's not the same thing, Anonymous Coward.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
At the risk of repeating myself, here goes:
Your "let-them-hit-delete" attitude totally misses the point. Not everyone is just exactly like you, you know. Many people, including most Europeans, pay per-minute or per-byte for Internet access. If I were one of these people, it would enrage me to have to buy additional connect time or transfer bandwidth just to get the headers of all the spam to delete it.
There, I repeated myself. I guess that's what happens when we take risks.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I guess clicking no is an error now.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Maybe--just maybe--eBay is telling the truth, and there was some kind of error that corrupted the preferences of some of their users. They set them back to default, and emailed them to let them know. They also instituted a grace period so that you would have time to change the preferences before being deluged with spam. A few people here have stated that they didn't receive the email, even though they had the "No spam" options selected. That kind of supports the limited preferences corruption theory.
It's also possible that they're doing this as an experiment with a limited section of their customer base, to see how people react.
Unfortunately, you don't know, so, until you do, don't overreact. Email them to find out why, instead of going nuts on them...
--
You've got to fight the spammers that be!
It's easy to admit powerlessness. Please walk the path less travelled and fight harder against the power. Be it through civil disobiedence (read: piracy) or some other means such as an absolute refusal to use products by certain vendors. We are, in the end, not powerless --just lazy. Alternatives exist for almost everything. We just have to look hard and re-train to use these alternative resources.
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Unless you paid for Bcentral (theres a freebie plan and a payment plan), you have no right to complain about wether or not they keep their databases intact!
It's free...
I like your idea, in fact, I admit to doing something similar:
cccsd0000@domain.name.com
ccc=user-initials (supports multiple users) and sd=spam-drop. Once the S/N ratio gets to low, I just create 'cccsd0001@domain.name.com' and drop the 'cccsd0000' alias. So on and so forth.
I like your idea of a unique address for each potential spammer as it provides a greater level of control over filtering. However, I think that it may be a bit too much trouble for me.
Either way, it's a hack. What we need are more jail terms for spammers!
Your post has me fearful over what the next Slashdot poll is going to look like.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
you would actually stop using Ebay over this, I would probably just ask "How long before you crawl under your bed with your laptop, writing to Slashdot to save you from the next eeeeeeeeeeeeevil marketing scheme that some corporation has come up with to *gasp* send you an e-mail!"
I can see that some people witin this community have already taken to the idea that the benefits of the internet are a god-given right to them now (along with the right to not only free speech but to have that speech heard, health-care and recreational drugs) and they should not be bothered with those things that keep the good deals and web sites like ebay flowing (advertising, customer targeting, etc.)
Wake up from your Star Trek view of reality; you just don't say "Brewski" and have one materialize in your hand with no other consequences; commerce drives the internet and when you get a good deal those people that gave you said deal will always have a way of extracting something valuable to them from you.
An error? Oh, so de-selecting spam was an error on my part I guess...
Oh good, just what I wanted. Join the hive!
---
Just filter the mosquitoes out of existence!!
While you're at it, send a complaint @ abuse.net! Whoa... get 'em blacklisted!
Yeah, cool...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Like many folks I have permanent Internet access, so I have a Linux box that acts a Firewall, fileserver, email host, etc, etc.
Unlike most ISP's I get a static IP address, and have registered my own domain, so what I do is every time I have to give out my email for something, I invent a new email address and then just alias it to my real one which I keep secret. Take yesterday for example. I just got a new phone from CarPhoneWarehouse - they wanted an email address from me, so I invented "cpw1" and popped it in the aliases DB when I got home. This has two benefits:
1) If I start getting SPAM addressed to "cpw1", then I know who the villain is who gave it away.
2) All I have to do to stop it is to remove "cpw1" as an alias and they instantly hit the bit bucket.
:-)
Macka
AP - Investors, having learned that Ebay is willing to engage in annoying practices that help them retain market presence, upgraded their price points for Ebay. At time of this press release Ebay's stock is up 9%.
In other news, Ebay CEO Meg Whitman took a break from the work involved in attempting to become the Asian Internet Auction leader, to cry over the loss of one customer.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
droogie73(210) lost his perfect feedback rating.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
Your mailbox is at the whim of any idiot with an internet connection. As long as a person's emotional well-being is linked to the contents of his mailbox, he is doomed to frequent bouts of anger. That's why I think the 'war on spam' is ultimately a dead end - there's always one more idiot ready to spam.
The guy who wrote '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' (what's his name?) talks about reducing your circle of concern to match your circle of influence. You can control your mail server and filtering software; you can't control the internet.
The MPAA executive has a heart attack because he can't control the spread of information on the internet. The geek has a heart attack because he can't control the flow of mail into his system.
Maybe there's a parallel with household phones. In the 1970's it was normal that if you dialled a house a loud alarm-like bell went off, and the occupants dropped whatever they were doing and answered the caller. That worked until it was systematically abused by pranksters and telemarketers. Now the norm is for an answering machine to screen the call, and increasingly caller ID is required.
Any protocol which allows you to make me jump via remote control is broken and will be exploited eventually.
... on 1/8/01, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of "yes" to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community. However, we want you to choose your Notification Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until 1/23/01. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Notification Preferences. You will, however, continue to receive certain administrative emails that are part of executing your eBay transactions.
Sounds like an invitation to have MAPS black-hole them - maybe immediately, certainly after 1/23.
But this is so blatantly improper that I can't help but wonder if it's a hoax. Has eBay offended someone who wants to give them grief? (Like maybe somebody in France who wants to collect WWII souvineers?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes replying to spam e-mail is usualy useless
they don't even bother to monitor replies
99% of the time they just bounce
http://Lenny.com
There's no need to boycott eBay on this (and other) sleazy behaviour. I mean, you knew up-front, when you registered, that they would probably be less than 100% honest. So, you did not give them your real, day-to-day address... Instead, they got stuck with a temporary address, which is only enabled if/when you're active on eBay. For the rest of the time, that address is commented out in your aliases, or .procmailrc, or whatever you use to separate the dead from the living.
At least, that's what I did when I signed up. As soon as I did, the spam started coming (from eBay itself as well as from the usual suspects), but it did not get across the threshold of port 25 on my box. Sorry mailer, address unknown, return to sender...
--frank[at]unternet.org
I suppose you should thank EBay for correcting your "mistake" in judgement.
I have my own domain name with a single mail queue...each time I give out my email I give a different addr with identifying information. It's always interesting to see who spams me in spite of their stated policy.
Well then, sir, I salute you. However, I believe you to be the exception rather than the rule. :)
Do you pay for any services? Yeah it sucks that they want to pump ads into your face, but that is their only source of revenue. You'd have a right to complain if you were paying for their service.
my $0.02 (Canadian)
corrosiv- Fighting for the same rights accorded to individuals of different skin color or ethnicity
- Fighting against corporate negligence which results in the deaths of consumers
- Fighting for liberty against a monarchist government which allows for no representation of its subjects
If one cannot see the difference between the two, then we have entered the black and white world of Idealism.eBay has apparently done it to more victims this time around, however. I think preferences are going to be ebayed other places as well if eBay continues to get away with their lies.
Hmm, would any speakers of colloquial Russian care to comment on the meaning of the term "ebayed"?
sidebar:
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Maybe they did screw up the defaults and they figure you're a stupid user like most of the people on the net. At least they informed you and gave you time to change it.
/.'s motto "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". I guess it matters if a moderator has the same thing happen to him.
/. and post the story, you could have gone to e-bay and flipped the switches off.
Isn't
What the hell are we suppose to discuss about this anyways? Do you have any proof that they didn't have the defaults screwed up?
In the time it took you to load
Not that I don't see how it's a stupid action, I just think you two are whining a little too much about it.
Reproduced here as formatted on eBay's sign-up form...
Do you want to receive junk mail from eBay?
No--> o
o<- PattBuchannan
Yes-> o
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
She complains about the amount of spam she gets, and yet she merrily enters her real unobfuscated e-mail address into every website, newsgroup, *everything*. She hasn't yet made the connection.
I wonder sometimes about where spammers actually get their adresses from. The poster here cites newsgroups... I've been active on Usenet since around 1994. He cites websites, I've been using the same adress on websites for about the same period. Both my persona and business adresses are blatantly visible on their respective webpages...
And yet between the two adresses I get less than 30 pieces of spam a day. Either I have a real high tolerance for annoyances, or the oft-cited sources of spammers getting your email adress is wrong.
Oddly enough, when I set up a spambucket adress at Yahoo!, even with very little use that box gets upwards of 50+ pieces of spam a day.
Well, I got an email from eBay Marketing today, whom I honestly believe are the ones at the heart of this bonehead maneuver. What I found profoundly disingenuous was that I was told I had opted to receive their junk mail.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In simple fact, I was never given the opportunity to opt out in the first place. Finding the preferences was less than a pleasant affair. And I know that any response from me to any offer to turn spam back on will be routed through my lawyer, not my mail server.
This is highly unethical business behavior, and I'm honestly surprised that eBay is doing it. My hope is that someone in eBay upper management will pink-slip the Pointy-Haired Marketer who approved this bit of lunacy and take a high-ground position about commercial mail. eBay has a big enough name to make that meaningful, or at least to make it noticed.
And yes, I too will go elsewhere should they decide to change my selections for me. eBay is just a place to find neat $#!+. But there are still garage sales and flea markets at which I can find neat $#!+, and they don't email me to tell me about other stuff that I don't want.
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind -- Timothy Leary
I just checked ebay to make sure my correct
preferences were selected, and realized something about radio buttons.
It is not per any HTML DTD spec to have a
group of Radio Buttons in which no button
is checked by default. I understand how
inconvenient that spec may seem to some
designers, but, if the implementation were
to spec, this ambiguous situation of "No default button" would not have been possible.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The management at eBay is either really stupid, or else they just don't give a rats ass about people who don't accept spam. Either way, I got a good laugh out of it.
Come to think of it, that would be a fun question to ask a marketing rep from eBay... "You recently sent out a message that can not possibly result in anything other than infuriating your customers. Do you dislike your them, or have you just failed to understand them?" Could we set up a Slashdot interview? :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"I don't think it should be blown up to be a case of 'violation', spam is just annoying, not violating. "
It may not be a violation of earth-shattering proportions, but its certainly a violation of trust of at least some weight. They asked the question before if people wanted information sent to them, good or bad, and people sent "no." The biggest issue with all this is the paper-thin excuse (if, indeed, this is not a hoax) that eBay seems to be floating to people: that due to an "error." What a crock! The fact that they would be attempting to pass off such an obvious lie just to meet their marketing quotas increases the underhandedness of the deed. I mean, its one thing to say: "We need the money!" versus "OOps! Obviously there was a problem because you don't want to hear from us!"
An action like this begs to ask why do they even give people the chance to opt out of correspondence, if they can change the rules whenever they want. Other than trying to pull a fast one over people's eyes.
But then, I haven't gotten a voluntary peep out of them other than the policy changes that happened last year and the bid/sell notices. No snail mail! They have the permission to do so. Maybe it's just that it costs money (or the family just throws it out anyway)...
--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
At least they're using a 'grace period' before they open the floodgates.
As long as they don't sent me notices about auctions for University Diplomas, internet spy software, and pop-up-laden pr0n, I won't be TOO annoyed.
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
...that the Palm Beach County election board have found themselves a new job.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Technophiles are notoriously weak-willed when it comes to resisting the allure of the new, shiny, and automated. We may talk a good game, but the majority of us still buy CDs, go to movies, passively support the use of Microsoft products (even purchase them), etc. etc. etc.
I'm sorry to be the cynical black cloud here, but "let's rage against everything corporate and wrong in this world" idealism has gotten tired. It's got heart, it's got courage, but it doesn't have a brain -- a brain that knows that Joe Consumer will repeatedly allow himself to be shat upon if he can get the Next Greatest Thing(TM).
eBay won't suffer from this, and I wouldn't be surprised if you frequent their site again within a few months.
Larry Reckner
larryr@DAMN.HORMEL.linux.com
This doesn't apply to ebay but if you hate spam
the bets thing to do is reply to it
follow my sig. for details
http://Lenny.com
When has pressing the delete key on email you don't want become such a difficult task that people nearly have a stroke when something like this happens.. I do see how eBay is trying to get more people to receive emails from 3rd parties, but they aren't forcing you. Especially with todays technologies and being able to filter email into the "Trash" folder, what is such the big deal? I live in an apartment, and I have one of those tiny apartment mail boxes, and every day I get some kind of catalog, or Penny Saver thing with ads on it, what do I do? I throw it away, but in computers when someone gets one peice of spam, its the end of the world. I can see getting upset about Porn Spam, or spam where you are getting an email every hour on the hour, but getting something once a week, that I can easily press that key labeled "Del", its right under the "Insert", I fail to see the earth shattering problem.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I had signed up for bcentral when I started my website a couple of years ago so I could use the banner exchange system. I quit using it completely about a year ago. I got sick of the daily email "updates" (full of crap) and also unsubscribed from that - twice. After unsubscribing the first time, the "daily updates" stopped for about a month and then restarted. The second unsubscribe didn't even faze them.
Many times, E-Bay's been a place for me to find junk that just can't be found in my neck of the woods. I think cancellation of your account is kind of an overreaction to the situation. E-Bay's given you the option of setting your preferences back to the way they were, and you won't recieve anything until 1/23, anyway. Set them back yourself, and if they perform a stunt like this again (which I don't think they will) then leave E-Bay.
I think that E-Bay will be well aware of the anxiety this e-mail caused, and avoid situations such as these in the future.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
I believe the difference between your settings and mine may only be that I have the following two set to yes:
Legal Notices
User Agreement Changes
Receive notice from eBay if the current User
Agreement changes.
Privacy Policy Changes
Receive notice from eBay if the current Privacy
Policy changes.
I want to know if their policies change in either of those two areas. I don't want any other junkmail. And I didn't get one of those letters.
But it is certainly odd that they'd assume it was an "error" especially if you've had these settings for some months.
Thalia
One question: what have you done to stop junk mail from coming to your home? Anything?
I don't get any anymore.
Of course, unsolicited real-mail is a different topic altogether. Not nearly as bothersome, time consuming to get rid of, or dangerous (ie. virii) as unsolicited email. Then again, maybe that's just my experience.
Though I'm not a subscriber to Ebay's service, I've seen other people complain about this on news.admin.net-abuse.email. Check out these deja.com discussions and you'll see that it's been a problem at least since early December 2000.
The only difference between spammers and Ebay is that spammers are just a bit more ruthless.
Has anyone else noticed the banners on eBay's search result pages now show
AOL Presents eBay
The individual items in search results have ebay.aol.com in the URL.
See http://www.ebay.aol.com/
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
From what I understand, they don't even charge to list items. I know the buyer base isn't as large, but if Ebay starts losing customers, then maybe they will stop sending spam.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
just a few thoughts...
what hump?
Being paranoid, I started at www.ebay.com and navigated to the form to change preferences. The URL was not quite the same as given in the e-mail. It certainly looks like it came from eBay, but what if it really came from some similar-spelled site (e.g. e8ay.com) and hundreds of people fell for it?
Maybe this e-mail was legitimate, but given the stupidity of the message "you made a mistake by opting out of spam", how are we to ever trust any future e-mail that directs us to a sign-in form?
You don't get ANY unsolicited snail mail? That's impressive...
My personal experience is that it's quicker to hit a delete key to get rid of an unwanted message (or to tag a list of them and delete them all at once) than it is to get rid of snail mail, but that's just my experience. And besides, snail mail means someone has my home address, which gives me more heebie jeebies than someone having my email address.
Again, these are just personal opinions. Everyone is entitled to their own...
(I will restate to those who think at this point that I endorse spam: I am severely opposed to spam, and I have no intention of endorsing it. I do, however, believe that it is unavoidable at this point, or if there is a way to get rid of it, it will find its way back in your mailbox if you don't constantly fight it. I hate to say it, but that's where I think we are at this point. It's a plague that will never completely go away...)
Ummm...waaaaah?
... so I unnerstand how you feel. I think they may reset theirs once a year. (And no, don't ask me why I have an AOL account. Bottom line is I don't pay much for it and I don't rely on it for anything important :p )
Apparently I'm the only one in the world who has neither received the email nor had any email notification settings changed (not yet, at least). Either there actually was a bug, or ebay just feels like toying with a few users at a time, so that the outroar doesn't all occur at once.
Well, that's another three lines in my procmailrc :)
:0:
* ^Return Path:
/dev/null
Allard
I haven't gotten that email, and a quick poll of some ebay users that I'm friends with indicate that I'm not alone. Have you ever thought that maybe a drive died somewhere and they had to restore from tape, resetting your settings or something like that? Maybe you should consider it next time before you start with this "I think I'll use my slashdot gun to get back at them for such an irritation", Hemos. Children like you shouldn't have such power.
Anyway, if you're pissed at the ebay/spam connection, there are much better things to raise your hackles about.. such as spammers getting email addresses from ebay.
I went and opted-out *again* and these are the categories where the default was set to "YES":
Other Emails:
Special Promotions, Offers and Events Receive notices about special offers for eBay members.
eBay Product Surveys:
Take part in occasional surveys to help us evaluate new features and proposed changes to our services.
Daily Status Emails
Receive a daily email status on auctions for which you are a bidder or seller.
Auction Watch Reminder
Receive daily lists of all items in your watch list that will end within 36 hours
Other Contacts
Telemarketing
Receive calls on behalf of eBay regarding eBay related products and services.
Direct Mail
Receive eBay's product and service related direct mail(through the postal service).
All I got to say is that these guys got balls the size of a small planet. The nerve! I opt-out and tell them "don't spam me". To which they reply: "sorry, we didn't hear you -- did you say 'SPAM ME' ??"
Accurate, honest, and true. But harsh.
That said, what is all this whining about? Did you really think that setting a bit in someone's database - especially a known privacy sink like eBay - was going to protect your privacy, or that a company like eBay would even make an attempt to honor your wishes if they thought they could tighten their bottom line?
I really hope all this shocked outrage I'm seeing here and on K5 is just curmudgeonly posing, because if it's actually genuine surprise, it represents a depth of naivete that boggles the mind.
It's business, and it is without a concept of honor or morality. Unless you make a law that holds representatives of the business personally accountable - as in jail time - they're going to do this again and again as long as it benefits them. Self-regulation doesn't work.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
--- This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine. ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Wouldn't it have been nicer to send out a message saying "Sorry to bother you, but we experienced some file system problems, and just wanted to make sure you wanted these preferences set to 'NO'. If you'd like to receive our messages please click HERE and change them to 'YES'". Actually changing the preferences seems like a big no-no.
I'm inclined to agree. I have my preferences set similarly, and recieved no e-mail.
I also agree with the point-- corporate america may not always be ethical. But usually, when they're being evil, they're smarter about it than this.
-- "You live and learn. Or you don't live long." -Heinlein
We just need to wait for the case law to catch up with the medium.
Oh, like we had to wait for the Microsoft antitrust? Or, do you mean patent laws?
I'm not trying to be combative, I just think that spam is inevitable since most politicians and lawmakers consider unsolicited advertising a necessary evil(in whatever form, I don't think anyone wants to see or hear commmercials on TV, radio or anywhere else). You didn't sign up to see commercials on TV when you went out and bought that DSS system. And you didn't tell any of the magazines you subscribe to to sell your name to phone solicitors (I think this is the most like email spam). This is perfectly legal, done without your consent, and happens all the time. You can tell phone solicitors not to call you, but inevitably one will again, because your name and number was sold to yet another solicitor.
Unfortunately, this is how business has adapted to the web - it participates in the same business practices as it had offline (in general, I mean, I'm not saying that Ebay existed offline, but the people who run Ebay had to come from *somewhere* else). Yes, it's underhanded; "business ethics" is an oxymoron. But they wouldn't have unsolicited advertising practically everywhere if it didn't work at all.
If you think having an email address is any different from having a snail mail address or phone number, it isn't. By law you are not granted any additional liberties in having an email address; if anything, the anonymity of an email address can hinder the liberties you enjoy on the phone or from a snail mailbox. Ebay will not be considered anything close to a spammer since it is considered reputable and provides the services it advertises.
In protest of Ebay's anti-spamming policies (or lack thereof), I created a special address -- ebay@mydomain.wherever -- that I used to bid in an auction that I lost exactly one time. Today, that address gets 5-10 spams per day, although I have only once used it, and that time on an auction I lost. Still, spammers harvested and apparently now sell my email address. So every time I get one, I forward it to safeharbor@ebay.com. I figure if *I* have to be annoyed at their failure to protect my email address, they should be too.
Unfortunately, the US Gov't in the recent privacy discussions probably feels that Ebay could do this normally. While they are going to come down on sites that don't have good privacy info, or that do not adhead to standards, the gov't seems fine to let the standard "opt-in" for web registrations continue unchecked, despite many computer and rights groups arguing for out-out as default. Mind you, I have found commercial sites that I use where opt-out is the default, and require you to click to sign in, but 90% of the rest of the sites are the reverse. Is it wrong? No. Is it immoral? Hard to say, since I can't opt-out of junk snail mail, though there's no direct cost to me with that. Is it poor customer service? Yes, for sure.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
In a nutshell they keep sending me crap, despite the fact that my mailing preferences are are set to "do not email this to me". This isn't a case of changing my preferences to yes, just ignoring them totally.
I've tried unsubscribing, emailing them polite messages (up until the last three which were progressivily harsher and ruder) and now I just bounce anything I get from them back with a fake "no such email address" message.
--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"They altered your preferences, and plan to start..."
You guys notice that eBay seems to have a big probelm keeping hard drives running, keeping their site up, and stuff like that? Wasn't that long ago that I kept reading about how eBay's servers died for over 8 hours at a time.
Also note how coincidental their announcement is to another bad news from Yahoo. Just a couple of days ago Yahoo told all their members that they'll be charging for auctions. What? Use Yahoo's bad news to sneak in another one, hoping to get away with it?
Lame...
I mean, that's why they are my preferences. So, today, eBay lost at least me as customer. .
Oh man, I guess they'll have to get by with 3,499,999 registered users instead of their 3.5 million.... I hope I have time to short their stock before the market reacts to this.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
No does not mean NO!
Look at they way you were dressed, You were asking for it!
I don't like
... E-bay had troubles with their servers. (NT,IIS). :>}
The preference settings got all screwed up and rather then admitting it, they set ALL the users to yes! When you go back, you are just testing their system.
Sounds good to me!
Where ever you go, There you are
ebay announced that they have been contracted to run the next elections in Florida....
www.eFax.com are spammers
This just ads to my growing list of reasons to stay away from ebay. My main problem with them derrives from their continual corporate suckage. Instead of helping their customers sell stuff, be it legitimate or not - they suck up to the companies that would rather it not be sold. Of course these "companies" have an interest vested in such a thing, the resell of a used item is often the loss of a sale of a new item. Last year I tried to sell a near worthless genuine copy of Win 95 in the original box and all. After a few bids my auction was canceled and good-ole Microsoft informed me that if I wished to sell it on ebay I would have to FIRST ship it to them so they could verify the legitimacy of it, and also include an original recipept. Do you think I have an original recipet for Win95?? Ridiculous. Not to mention its not exactly worth the postage to send it to MS and back to get permission from them, "god" apparently, to sell my item. The other problem with ebay is the continually growing list of banned items. They don't care AT ALL about freedom so to hell with them.
they are capable of mating with dogs and they are a diferent species ;'cannis lupus' (or similar spelling) as oposed to 'cannis cannis' for dogs.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
My impression is that it is caused by people using a search routine to troll through eBay's databases and search engines to get my email address. When I'm selling items, I don't list my email address as part of the listing nor as part of my listing, nor is it part of my login name. But it's annoying all the same that they do not apparently protect against such abuses of their own system.
Emails to them go ignored - I can't think of anyone I hate more than dealing with eBay's customer support as a seller.
Is there any way I can protect my email address from spam without making my buyers not be able to contact me?
It offends me deeply that eBay has arbitrarily forced me to 're-opt-out' of their email spam when I'm already getting spammed because of their negligence in securing the email addresses of their users.
I created a separate mailbox for eBay stuff and found that I get maybe one announcement a month from eBay and they were at least semi-interesting.
But, I get about 20 spams a week to that account which is only published on eBay. Bottom line: eBay announcements don't hold a candle to the amount of spam you get from eBay derived addresses.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Ebay is a TRUSTe Licensee, which means they have to conform to a bunch of privacy policy requirements. Send your complaints to TRUSTe and try to get their TRUSTe privileges revoked.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Its not very difficult to get free email addresses... Microsoft, Netscape, and many others, will give you a plethora of email address to use if you're afraid of getting your "real" email full of canned meat.
I didn't get that e-mail, maybe you selected:
Do you NOT want to receive a bunch of crap
* No, send me a bunch of crap.
--
you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
Because I use eBay regularly, there are things I need from it, so I had yes to:
Listing Confirmations
Bid Notices
Outbid Notices
User Agreement Changes
Privacy Policy Changes
and Daily Status Reminders
Geez, as slashdotters that are worried about TOS and privacy policies, I'm surprised that it seems so many of you set "Privacy Policy Changes" and "User Agreement Changes" to NO! Maybe the management thought that something really was in error, because people either want to hear about their auction updates, or they want to hear about corporate changes that affect them. Someone not wanting to hear anything is a bit odd, I must say.
For all your talk about "eBay losing you as a customer", what are you going to do about it? Yahoo auctions? Amazon.com? I hope you like the items you're trying to sell getting viewed by all of three people.
/., you don't see much getting directed at eBay, even though they complete dominate their market, and can pull stuff like this crap without too much worry. I wonder why.
For all the anti-monopoly sentiment that gets thrown around on
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
And it managed to get them on the RBL. Looks like ebay may find themselves there too if they are not careful.
...because they sold me a defective cowbell.
- Homer Simpson
Even Outlook Express allows you to set up rules to direct incoming mail. And don't come back to me saying "But I shouldn't have to set up a filter to block unsolicited mail blah blah blah" because that's exactly what filters are for. And, all you *nix gearheads probably have mail programs with a lot better filtering capablities than OE. Use 'em.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
GOBACK.
It is egregious. If there was a processing error on their part, fine - tell people they had a bug and "if you DO want to receive email from us, please go to (url here) and change your preferences." That too hard to do?
And, you don't get 2 weeks to re-customize: THEY get 2 weeks to process the change you make in your prefs.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
"Thank you for letting us know which types of eBay communications you'd like to receive.
Your preferences have been saved. Please note that changes to your preferences may take approximately 14 days to be reflected in our communication to you."
Ah, 14 days... This is internet time, eh?
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
Yeah, I understand. You don't want to receive email from them. They messed up from a marketing perspective and made "no" the default, so now they do something mildly slimy.
At least they're being honest about it.
In the immortal words of Eric Cartman, "What's the big fuckin deal, bitch?"
First off, it's not like you can't go back in and turn it off. This takes what, all of 60 seconds? Secondly, they're giving you two weeks to do it before they start sending you stuff.
It just seems kind of overreactionary to me.
Just my $.02 :)
--
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
Yes, let's look at the big picture, why don't we?
When I signed up for eBay, I selected NO to all the spam. I don't want spam. Period.
Now they're saying that it looks like an error if everything was selected as "no", and therefore they need to put you "in line" with the others.
Now... they've already proven that they've done this once. What about the NEXT time when they "notice" that all your selections are set to NO?
What about the next newbie who signs up for eBay service? Will s/he have to go through the same thing at some point in the future? If s/he does, will everyone else have to go through the same thing AGAIN? Will it become company policy to periodically reset your preferences because they look like an "error"?
If they keep resetting my preferences in order to send me spam, that's unsolicited mail. What's worse, they are SPECIFICALLY opting me back in without my permission. And if they're going to do this periodically, this makes it even worse. Eventually, they're going to catch me while I'm gone on vacation, and I won't be around to reset my preferences before the deadline expired.... HELLO SPAM!
No thanks, I am *NOT* going to put up with that. It looks like that in order to opt-out of eBay spam, I have to completely opt-out of eBay altogether.
You will see my email address above. Now, the question is why did you post anonymously?
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
GOBACK.
Nothing like having a company tell you how to think. "We noticed you didn't want to receive anything.....so we put you in line with the rest of the community." Gee...sorry for thinking for myself, and not like a bunch of sheep. It's good to know that the companies out there are respecting our opinions. I have an ebay account, but I didn't seem to get that email yet. Kind of odd, I just placed a bid on something yesterday.
I got that e-mail last night too. Ok, it's annoying that they reset my preferences. If they had simply said something like "we think you may really be interested in our special promotions, so we're signing you up for them; if you still don't like them, you can unsubscribe again" at least it would have been honest, although still annoying.
But to claim that opting out of their promotions is an error that they have corrected for me really takes some nerve. If they had computer problems and lost my preferences that would be acceptable too. But the e-mail says an error occurred "during your registration process". So basically they are telling me it was a mistake for me to say "no". That's what really ticked me off about this.Why am I always having to explain these things to you people?
eBay is not saying that your opt-out choices are an error, they are saying that their defaults were in error. Still, it is questionable for them to reset the accounts that were affected by this "error", but note that you have two weeks to re-customize your preferences before they start sending you emails based on the reset preferences. This letter is yet another example of how the corporate mentality allows for rough treatment of customers to attempt to recover profit opportunities lost through their own mistakes, but its not such an egregious assault as y'all make it out to be.
With all the companies that have lost Hemos' business, its no wonder we're experiencing an economic downturn. :)
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
There was an error in processing your answer to our question "would you like to have sex?"...we thought we heard you say "No". To bring you in line with all our past dates, we are going to starting f***ing you now. Of course, we want you to retain choice, so you can tell us what position you want us to give it to you in.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
...I got that message and clicked the link to change all those spam settings back to the way they should be.
In doing so, I noticed that there is no 'End of Auction Notices' selection except for my pager. That's the one email I need...
--------
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Well, you subscribe them to few thousands of mailing lists (they'll love linux-kernel one), and send them a notification that they can unsubscribe at any time.
Sounds fair to me...
I disagree. If you say 'no', how does that constitute and error?
And the fact that they LET you have a choice doesn't matter if your choice is "say yes" or "say no and get told you meant yes". That sounds about like the choice between Bush and Gore. And I know I keep rehashing this, but a choice between two options that leave you in the same state is not really a choice. And that is the big picture.
I don't think it should be blown up to be a case of 'violation', spam is just annoying, not violating. But it should be addressed. And a company that is knowingly doing such things (and I really doubt that this is done without anyone in the company having knowledge of it) should have its customers say, "What's going on?" at the very least.
------------
Then he'll be back. Ebay is like crack when you want to find something. Unfortunately, there are no other solid alternatives.
You have Amazon, but supposedly everybody gave up on them when they raped the privacy policy.
Also, Ebay probably has giggles when they get mad customer emails, because they know that few mad customers are like drops in the ocean of consumers willing to roll over.
Rather than the half-ass lame "they lost me as a customer" a far more potent (but requires work) is to get legislation passed that prevents companies from spamming you, or using personal data that you don't want them too. If you can find a congressperson who isn't 0wn3d already (hard in itself).
Then once you have the legal recourse, you get hold of some attorneys and file a class-acion lawsuit for some big bucks. Again this requires more effort/money.
So its a long road to hoe. But only when companies are about to get there ass blown off financially will they pull there head out. Until then, lame "they lost me as a customer" only makes them laugh.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Okay, fine, it's business. They basically offer a service which includes a bunch of yes/no choices: do you want to receive this, that, and the other.
All of a sudden, they're saying "we know you said you don't want this, but we don't believe you meant it. Let us know if you did."
The point isn't setting up filters. (It isn't even that filters mean the stuff is still going through your ISP.) The point is trust.
Would you do business with a car dealership that sent you a letter saying they were altering your lease, and call by the end of the month if you don't want to pay more? Sure, you have the chance to keep it the way it is. But you shouldn't have to go to extra trouble to get them to stick to an agreed-on set of rules.
This month, they're saying they'll spam people unless they opt out again. A company that would do that is entirely capable of sending out email saying "we noticed an error in your registration. Please log in and go to thus-and-such if you really don't want us selling your name and address."
Yes, eBay has a good record so far. They also have no actual product--they're an intermediary between buyers and sellers. If they lose trust, they're hosed. And this sort of behavior does not inspire me to trust them.
Weblog: http://www.redbird.org/yawl.html
is this to say that if nabisco sends you some junk mail you won't eat oreos anymore ? ....
eBay is only one of many that do that sort of thing. I and a lot of other people I've talked with have had similar problems with places like techies.com, which is a major recruiting monster.com-like technical site. If you opt-out of their mailing lists, they continue to email you, but from other regions. For example, I signed up on the Portland Oregon site. Then I opted out of their mailing lists. They stopped sending the spam, but then I suddenly started reciving spam from places like their Kentucky server.
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seumas.com
Well, if EBay is the only company you deal with, I agree that it is not that big a deal. However....
I deal with dozens of different companies, and over time have purchased from hundreds. If every damn one of them sent me one or two of these a year, it would be a big problem.
Barnes and Noble is amongst the most rude, IMHO. It was confided to me that if you haven't ordered from them for three months, they figure they have lost you and that they may as well spam you against your preference in case you have forgotten them and will then order. If every company operated this way, email would be unusable.
That is why a preference once expressed should remain the preference forever. If you screw up the database and spam your customers you should be sanctioned like any two-bit MMFer.
The text they sent along was pretty much BS, but they do notify you 2 weeks before anything is supposed to go into effect.
If they did this once a year, it won't be a big deal, but if they do it every month it would be a PITA.
There may be some underhanded tracking going on as everyone logs back in to set their prefs to "no", but in general, it is a very slight annoyance. They are only insulting your intelligence, not violating your rights.
-- n3bulous
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
I noticed in the email they considered your choices of "NO" everywhere to be a "default".
Of course, RealPlayer does this too. If you uncheck all their spamming options, you'll get a popup window asking you if you are really sure you wanna do that. I also think there's no button that says "unselect all" but there is one to check all the damn boxes.
Or Ghandi
Or nader(although I liked exploding cars)
George Washington didn't put up with crap. We do I?
This isn't idealism. This is the everyday struggle that good men must fight to keep from having a jack boot on your throat.
LANDO: You said my E-bay references would be left in the city under my supervision.
VADER: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
www.randomdrivel.com -- All that is NOT fit to link to
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I have my own domain, so when I sign up for stuff, I use their domain@my domain.com. For example, I used to get crap from Microsoft sent to "sidewalk.com@thilmony.com". When it started to irritate me, and they wouldn't unsubscribe me easily, I just set up my smtp to redirect "sidewalk.com@thilmony.com" to "spam@microsoft.com". I haven't heard from them since.
YES, there is a McDonald's in Hanoi Square.
If it isn't a spoof I have to think that whoever came up with this stupid idea will be fired rather quickly. Let's give them a chance to denounce this.
The first time I read this I just assumed it was a spoof. Can we even verify that this is genuine? It's so ludicrous that I can't believe the company, any company, would stand behind it.
I admit companies will play very fast and loose with the rules to get their message into my in-box, but the wording here sounds like it's almost trying to incite a riot.
"Many of your Notification Preference defaults were set to "no" rather than to "yes", which means that unlike other eBay members, you're not receiving these types of communications."
This is just stupid. It's got to be a spoof. "We feel you made an error when you asked us not to send this email."
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
You're right. I'll change it to the right one. Thank you for pointing that out.
I'm not against writing a rule to direct my mail. Anyone who complains about it should either
Again, I apologize for not practicing what I preach.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
GOBACK.
It could've been handled better (ask you to double check your settings) but since not everybody received the message indications would be that for some reason they thought there might be a problem.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
that's why they're in the RBL...
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j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
It seems to me that their system screwed up, so they no longer know the correct state of a few fields, so they set them back to the defaults. Sure that might be annoying but they also offer for him to set them back himself:
;)
However, we want you to choose your Notification Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until 1/23/01. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Notification Preferences.
Why doesn't he just go in and set them back? Is it really that big of a deal?
BTW - this is the reason I keep my XXX@netscape.net account - it's a spam recepticle rather than a daily use account.
Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
That's what I did on Travelocity. It worked!
That when eBay went down the other day some files got corupted etc, and when they came around to restore every thing they just hit the 'default' button and reset every thing to default. if slashdot lost all of it's users prefs, but not the users passwords etc. what would be easyest, to email every one of them and ask them to fix it. or reset every thing to default?
Seany
"Where ever you go, there you are"
... why is everyone assuming that eBay thinks that choosing all 'no's in the signup pages is what they meant? What likely happened is that you forgot to fill something in, went back a page ("error - please enter a valid name", etc), carried on, and they thought that you may have forgot to choose "yes" to the questions.
It's perfectly logical: you might have forgotten something or your browser may have reset the options to "no" as you went back a page. Would you rather not have the opportunity of being updated when their privacy policy changes or whether they'll start charging extra?? With sending this email they can now say "well, we wanted to warn you of the 10 per cent price increase, but you selected the option for us not to email you when you signed up", which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Jeez.
At least they sent you an Email letting you know what they were doing, and how to correct it, should you wish to change it.
Granted, setting it all to "yes" is a little bold - but for most users, they probably want it this way. "Oooh, more info - sure, send it!"
If they hadn't told you about it, I'd be a little more worried. No harm done - just go and set your preferences back.
What do you expect from a country that puts people in jail because of what vegetables they consume. When the government sets brain dead examples by saying they know what is better for you than you do yourself, and threaten that judgment with punishment, companies are sure to follow the leader and set brain dead policies that threaten you in some way.
www.ridiculopathy.com
It gets tricky - your data on their servers is being modified by them, because they didn't like your ideas about what you wanted to receive from them. Some would say "But wait, it is their machines, and they can do with the data as they please." - right? Perhaps if you aren't paying for it, but you are, indirectly, by being willing to look at thier banner ads, which you pay for (once again, indirectly) with bandwidth.
Very grey area, to say the least. But what happens in the future...
Dear user,
We are sorry to inform you that your recent email written using BigCorp ASPMailClient did not get sent. In fact, we deleted it, because it said disparaging things about our sister company, SmallCorp. Please refrain from saying bad things we don't like. Remember, we have your credit card number...
Seem impossible? If the dream of ASPs come true, you will pay to see, access, and alter your data, stored remotely on a server not under your control. They may do what they wish with the information, and as current law stands, not by liable for anything they do with it, because the law is in such a grey area over who owns it.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I disagree. We just need to wait for the case law to catch up with the medium.
If you directly tell a telemarketer to remove your information and not contact you again, they have to comply or your have legal recourse. They can be fined.
eBay is a big company. Enough PO'd users could equal a class action law suit. And it's even easier with spam. You have a paper trail. If you set your preferences and they set them back..... Seems like a slam dunk law suit. Provided the case law catches up.......
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com