Email Appending Erodes Privacy!
"Psssst! Hey buddy, check dis out over heeya. If ya give me yer
database of customas' offline info, I'll give you email
addresses to match! Waddaya say pal? $2 per name, awright?"
That's how it might go down in a dark alley in privacy
advocates' nightmare, but the reality is that the email
appending industry uses bright chirpy banter and photos of
clean-cut staffers to tell you the story. The following link
will take you to the site of a vendor who explains email
appending with Sunday-school innocence.
http://www.accudata.com/s_selfpromotion/email_append.html
Email appending is big business. Here's how it works. A
multinational corporation wants to send out an email campaign to
it's database of offline customers, say those who purchased
their computer printer and filled out the warranty card and
mailed it in. The problem? They don't have the email addresses
of those customers. Who ya gonna call? Here, let's visit my
favorite search engine, Google, and type "email appending" into
the search box. Click submit.
There are results 1 - 10 of about 42,300. Search took 0.05
seconds. So much for exhaustive research. Well I suppose that if
you wanted to drag things out a bit you could do a few price
comparisons. The industry is huge and profitable.
So you want email addresses? Zip us an Excel spreadsheet of your
customers names, addresses and phone numbers and we'll send back
email addresses to match those customers with. What we won't
tell you is that we are missing a good deal of that information
ourselves and you'll be paying us to incorporate YOUR
information into our email database. If you pay us enough, we'll
even tell you about those customers lives, their taste in cars,
their travel habits and their income levels. And . . . that's
not all, if you can provide us with information on their
computer system and software purchases, we'll throw in a free
recap of their credit history -- No Charge!
DoubleClick was publicly reamed for announcing they would do
this by merging the database of a direct marketing company they
acquired with their own database of email addresses and the
surfing habits of online users. They were sued, they lost
millions, they were vilified in the press. Hmmmm. Why don't we
care that 42,300 others are doing the same thing?
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has introduced guidelines
on the practice. A marketing industry analyst comments in the
email marketing publication, "Opt-in News" editorialized on the
self-serving nature of the DMA's dance around the term "Opt-In"
when they say:
E-mail address appending is the process of adding an
individual's e-mail address to that individual's record inside a
marketer's existing database. This is accomplished by matching
the marketer's database against a third party, permission-based
database to produce a corresponding e-mail address. I was amazed
that the organization (Direct Marketing Association) danced
around privacy issues by creating a loophole extravaganza. The
document was written by marketers for marketers, culminating in
a classic case of a wolf in sheep's clothing.
If even email marketing industry publications have strong words
for the practice of email appending, what should the public
think of the meticulous gathering of personal information by
marketers into vast databases of assembled information that the
public knows nothing about, gave no permission or consent to
assemble that information, and would likely disapprove if they
did know the practice was going on behind their back.
May 20, 2002, a financial privacy bill was defeated a second
time in California after banking and insurance industry
lobbyists contributed $5 Million toward politicians who opposed
(or refused to vote on) a bill denying them the right to trade
and sell Californians private financial information. Governor
Gray Davis received nearly $1 Million ($880,000) of that amount
after agreeing to veto any financial privacy bill that crossed
his desk.
Californians have some very strong privacy advocates in the
California Senate, like Senator Jackie Speier, who introduced
various versions of her financial privacy bill repeatedly, only
to have banking and insurance industry lobbyists jump in to
change the outcome.
Online business is contributing dramatically to the erosion of
privacy by assembling personal, private, sensitive information
about each and every customer simply by seeking the email
addresses of their customers when they didn't receive it from
the customer personally, but through email appending services.
Those services may have only had a name and email address to
match before the online business unkowingly contributed all the
data they held about their customers to the email appending firm
doing the research.
The automotive department at Sears offers up name address, phone
number, car model, make and repair history to an email appending
firm when they request customers email addresses from those
appending firms. They get the email address, but have just
contributed to further privacy erosion in order to send an email
about their lube, oil and filter change special.
The appending firm deals with a bank, a computer superstore and
a discount warehouse and now has information that was
inaccessible to them before. I could be argued that the
businesses should be paid for the information they have given up
to gain the email address. But they don't realize what they are
doing in most cases. Even if they do understand the privacy
invasion involved here, they are unlikely to care. They just
want the email address to spam, er, market to their customers!
I wonder how much they'd charge to remove my information from
all those databases? I don't think I could afford to buy back my
privacy once you add up all the money spent to violate it.