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If even email marketing industry publications have strong words for
practice of email appending, what should public think of meticulous gathering of personal information by marketers into vast databases of assembled information that public knows nothing about, gave no permission or consent to assemble that information, and would likely disapprove if they did know 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 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 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 outcome.
Online business is contributing dramatically to erosion of privacy by assembling personal, private, sensitive information about each and every customer simply by seeking email addresses of their customers when they didn't receive it from customer personally, but through email appending services. Those services may have only had a name and email address to match before online business unkowingly contributed all data they held about their customers to email appending firm doing 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 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 businesses should be paid for information they have given up to gain email address. But they don't realize what they are doing in most cases. Even if they do understand privacy invasion involved here, they are unlikely to care. They just want 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 money spent to violate it.
Mike Banks Valentine I-Privacy Discussion List Protecting Privacy is Good for Business http://www.adventive.com/lists/iprivacy/summary.html SUBSCRIBE: mailto:i-privacy-join-request@list.adventive.com
