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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?"

1 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. 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?