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Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy details the tactics of retailers and marketers to sell customer data. Examples include promising not to sell consumer data, but then 'renting' the data, and the use of shopping cart software with different privacy policies than the merchant."
Piracy over profit!
If it's not already illegal, this should be, especially if there is no notice of any particular size informing the user that the change is present. If a shopping cart is linked from the primary site, such that the users of the primary site must use the shopping cart, the terms of service should propagate with it too. This could set some interesting legal precedents if it's explored.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What next?
Businesses choose profit over customer safety?
Businesses choose profit over employee safety?
What about the obvious?
Businesses choose profit over anything else!?!
I am glad the Washington Post is on top of this. I doubt I would have ever figured this out on my own.
ACK
I'll pay $5 for the name of that anonymous submitter.
the 257th Rule of Acquisition says "Sell to your customers first, then sell your customers!"
...some people will do it. It's money, and it's more money than a lot of people realize.
For example, I run a site that's pretty damn big, something like 300,000 accounts so far. I've already gotten several "business inquries" from direct marketing companies asking if I'd like to "rent" my customer data to them -- and some of these people are offering upward of 5 cents per user. And I don't have to tell you that a nickel here and a nickel adds up.
I haven't sold my user lists and never will, but rest assured that if I wanted to there is a huge market of companies that would be willing to let me name my own price.
And that is why companies do it.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
I wrote this in a fit of pique some years back. I've never tried actually putting into practice, though.
If, using nothing more than a, "license," these companies can absolve themselves of social responsibility with the stroke of a pen -- or the tap of a key -- then surely you can drag them back to civilized behavior using the same methods.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I do exactly the same thing (with the user+mailbox@example.com format) and have found at least two otherwise reputable places selling my address. In both cases, when I confronted them, they strenuously denied ever selling my address to spammers (one going so far as to suggest that I was using the same obviously unique address elsewhere, or that a spammer had hacked into my system and sifted through my data looking for e-mail addresses to spam).
Clearly they leaked the address somehow. But I have to consider the possibility that one of their employees sold it on the side, or that their systems were compromised. In both cases, I presented these as the only likely scenarios and told them if they weren't going to take measures to prevent it, I would take my business elsewhere.
In addition to this trick, I have a subdomain set up as a 'trap' for spam, and automatically generate e-mail addresses using keywords, encoded IP addresses and date/time stamps to embed within web pages. Spam harvesters pick them up without a significant risk of someone legitimate trying to use one to contact me. With enough information in the e-mail address, you can go back and see exactly who harvested the address. ISPs frequently don't see these types of complaints, and if you're lucky, the spammer is doing the harvesting on a more persistent Internet account and not his throw-away spam injection account. (This is especially interesting for those Nigerian scams, since your local authorities have the ability to use that information to track the guy sending the e-mails by way of his harvesting.)