ACLU Reacts to Privacy Concerns

nettle writes "Back in September I began a series of commentaries about one person's experience signing up as a new member of the ACLU. I'd used their website to sign up, and was shocked to find my mailbox full of junk parcels, flyers, and personalized merchandise from dozens of nonprofit organizations like People for the American Way, Sierra Club, Americans for This, Americans for That, yadda yadda. I complained to the ACLU, having suspected that they had given out my contact info. So I wrote about the situation on my Nettle.com blog here and here and began a public correspondence with Anthony Romero, Exec Dir of ACLU, and Nadine Stossen, President of ACLU. Nadine promised they'd take action. I told her if they fixed the signup page on ACLU's website so that people could opt-out of ACLU's personal-info-sharing, I'd renew my membership. Well, Nadine kept her end of the bargain. Here's a screen capture of their new signup page. And my check to the ACLU goes out in today's mail! Blogs DO make a difference."

Comments

re: opt-out at nonprofits

[bscott]

I've mentioned this story in the past, but it bears repeating here - even with good intentions, sometimes opt-out doesn't make much difference...

I worked for several years at a well-known nationwide nonprofit charity, maintaining a donor database with an address list in the low 6 figures in length. For a variety of reasons, we had a lot of ongoing technical problems, especially when it came to address sharing with other nonprofits - long stories aside, there came a day when I was digging into the workings of an update query which effectively implemented the "Don't share my address" checkbox on the donation form. Turns out, for at least the past 3 years (starting prior to my tenure), it had been set up backwards. When I fixed it, some 16,000 records got updated... (and who knows, maybe the correction eventually propagated around the nonprofit community's mismash of list-exchange systems??)

My point is, once your information gets out, consider it out for good. Everything from fuzzy wording of a privacy agreement to out-and-out unethical behavior (either as company policy, or due to a disgruntled employee or hacker attack) could cause your data to go where you don't want it to - or, it might just be a technical glitch somewhere deep in an under-tested program handled by an under-trained user.