German Court: "Sharing" Your Amazon Purchases Is Spamming (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A court in Germany has ruled that the 'Share' links which Amazon provides to customers directly after making a purchase at the site are unlawful. The "Share" functionality provides buttons which allow the consumer to signal a new purchase via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or email. The court, ratifying an earlier decision made at a lower court, declared that emails initiated via the Share function constitute "unsolicited advertising and unreasonable harassment."

Comments

Seems like freedom of speech to me

[mmiscool]

Seems like freedom of speech to me

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[gstoddart]

It's freedom of speech if you take the link, copy it into Facebook or Twitter and say "just got me one of these babies".

It's spam when a commercial entity gives you a quick means of shilling their product without stopping to think "do my friends really give a shit?" It's doubly spam if your friends email is ever provided to Amazon in this process without their consent.

Because if your friends didn't give Amazon permission to send email, pretending like you spontaneously sent the email is kind of bullshit.

No, sorry, making commercial communication appear to have been a spontaneous outpouring by consumers is a shady way of getting around stuff like opt-in.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[gstoddart]

Shady and tacky, but still should be protected against government intrusion.

There are spam laws, you can't just pretend they don't exist.

I sure as hell don't want to use an internet where any asshole can decided that I don't get a vote in if I see their commercial speech or not.

Sorry, take your anti-government crap elsewhere. Accepting all spam as free speech is idiotic. You do not have the freedom to send me unsolicited commercial email just because you're an ass who thinks its his right.

Fuck that. The onslaught of bullshit from corporations would be impossible.

I don't give a shit about what some asshole in marketing believes is the free speech of his company.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's doubly spam if your friends email is ever provided to Amazon in this process without their consent.

THIS. It is not okay to spam me just because one of your customers has me in their address book, Facebook friends, etc. and you got their permission. You did not get my permission. The amount of bullshit spam I was getting from LinkedIn, because other people installed that app and it harvested all of their contacts to send spam to, got so bad I had to block LinkedIn's IP ranges from connecting to my mail server. Some companies think it's reasonable to spam their customers and everyone they know, as if there's some type of opt-in-by-proxy. It doesn't work that way.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[pla]

without stopping to think "do my friends really give a shit?"

So, basically no different from the entire rest of Facebook?

"I just ate a bag of Doritos" - I don't give a shit.
"Look at these pictures of my new puppy/baby/ocelot/car/hairstyle" - I don't give a shit.
"I just bought a new Dyson Vacuum on Amazon" - I don't give a shit.
"Sally has just changed her relationship status to emotional blackmail" - I don't give a shit.
"I just took a great big shit" - Nope, I still don't give a shit.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[ScentCone]

It's freedom of speech if you take the link, copy it into Facebook or Twitter and say "just got me one of these babies".

It's spam when a commercial entity gives you a quick means...

Nonsense. Is it legit if you hand write a letter to your grandma about your purchase, but spam if you use a pre-printed letter that came in the box, and you fill in a few blanks before mailing it to grandma? No? Specifically why or why not?

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the way these things actually work is I, Amazon's customer, authorize Amazon to post this message to my facebook, twitter, etc account. It then becomes visible to anyone who can see my social media feeds, and automatically notifies anyone who gets notifications about activity on my feeds.

So, anyone seeing my shared purchase info, has opted in to seeing whatever crap I post to the stream, and I authorised this post.

It's an asinine thing to do, but ultimately it is not in any philosophical way equivalent to Amazon sending unsolicited advertisement.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[pla]

Whoah, put down them irons, cowboy! You can just ignore it when Amazon asks if you want to share your purchase. You don't even need to say "no", you just move along with whatever you wanted to do next.

I hate spam as much as the next guy, but "don't click the goddamned share this button" falls juuust tad short of sending 50M emails a day about Chinese V1@gra.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[cayenne8]

You know..I've seen these buttons on the completion of sales...and wondered if that many people actually share or notify friends when they BUY something?!?!

Seriouslyl? I mean...why?

I know there are some people out there who like to brag, or show off....but I can't believe that is in the majority out there, is it?

Are there really a significant enough number of people that actually 'share' some if not all of what they buy online??

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[umafuckit]

Seems like freedom of speech to me

You know what? Freedom of speech is there to protect important stuff, not bullshit like this. There is no absolute freedom of speech because there are already several forms of speech that, as a society, we deem illegal. So if a court decides that a vendor encouraging people to advertise for them for free is spamming, then I'm happy to take that in the spirit in which it is intended and not debase the important right to freedom of speech to defend Amazon. Where your rights are actually being eroded is by things such as "companies are people and are entitled to freedom of speech". That kind of thing concentrates power in the hands of the few whilst masquerading as democracy.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[Xenx]

But.... ocelot.

Re:Seems like freedom of speech to me

[pregister]

Why do you not realize it isn't the quality of your friends' posts that is poor, but the quality of your friends?

Re:Advertising is not a freedom of speech issue

[ScentCone]

Fortunately the world is not quite stupid enough to accept that as a valid excuse for what is very clearly unsolicited advertising.

It's not unsolicited advertising. If you don't like seeing communication that the friends and contacts YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO HEAR FROM are sending out through deliberate action on their part, then you simply have poor choice in friends and are trying to blame someone else.

Re:Advertising is not a freedom of speech issue

[thoromyr]

in what way is the advertising unsolicited? the receiver did not ask their friends to spam them.

You wouldn't by any chance represent a sales or marketing type, would you? I had to deal with a spammer for a while (as in, supporting his activities). Even though he was buying software to harvest emails to send unwanted and unsolicited email, he too found ways to justify his activities.

What was particularly memorable was dealing with his complaints about his spam being filtered out as being spam. He insisted and swore up and down that it wasn't. Unfortunately for him, spam filters are pretty good these days and even if *he* as the *sender* didn't feel like it was spam, the rest of the world disagreed.

So, yes, it *is* unsolicited advertising. I'm glad you don't have my email address because by the sound of things you wouldn't honor any request to quit fucking spamming me.