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DoubleClick Gets Into Spam

Posted by timothy on from the now-with-50-percent-more-evil dept.

keytoe writes: "Well, just when we thought everyone's favorite Privacy Snoop was starting to mellow out a bit, we discover this little tidbit. DoubleClick is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.' Using DARTmail, you can now target your bulk mailings 'based on profile data.' I wonder which profiling data they're talking about. Perhaps, say, all the data they've been collecting for years?"

4 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Speculation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Now I'm not one to avoid being a rabid alarmist, but the article really doesn't say anything that suggests Doubleclick is making data it has collected available to Spammers. The statement "helping advertisers segment their customer data to launch more targeted ads" suggests that they are making the technology available for these people to process their own data.


    Maybe that's no better and I could be wrong but there's nothing in the article to suggest that they are selling actual personal data of any kind as part of this deal.

  2. Read the article! It's for customers by quistas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.

    -- q

  3. Spam isn't effective - market forces don't apply by Philbert+Desenex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.

    Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.

    Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.

    What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.

    This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.

    The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.

    Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.

  4. Re:Do you know what spam is? by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Insightful
    > Now, this isn't so say that all people are nice. That's not to say that people don't troll web pages and people don't fake mail-from headers. It happens. But there's also a lot of promotional mail that YOU OPTED INTO whether you realize it or not.

    Bullshit.

    If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.

    That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.

    >What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.

    So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!

    The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.

    So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.

    And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.

    And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.

    > And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.

    How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."

    If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?