Email Appending Erodes Privacy!Written by Mike Banks Valentine
"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 reality is that email appending industry uses bright chirpy banter and photos of clean-cut staffers to tell you story. The following link will take you to 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 warranty card and mailed it in. The problem? They don't have email addresses of those customers. Who ya gonna call? Here, let's visit my favorite search engine, Google, and type "email appending" into 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 database of a direct marketing company they acquired with their own database of email addresses and surfing habits of online users. They were sued, they lost millions, they were vilified in press. Hmmmm. Why don't we care that 42,300 others are doing same thing? The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has introduced guidelines on practice. A marketing industry analyst comments in email marketing publication, "Opt-in News" editorialized on self-serving nature of DMA's dance around term "Opt-In" when they say: E-mail address appending is 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 marketer's database against a third party, permission-based database to produce a corresponding e-mail address. I was amazed that 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.
| | Are You Making This Embarrassing E-Mail Mistake?Written by Nick Nichols
About a month ago I got a cold call from a guy selling Web servers. He apparently got my name from WhoIs directory of Internet domain names. As an Internet marketing consultant with several Web sites, I'm always interested in knowing what current market pricing is for hosting, so I let guy give me his pitch. He asked me what kind of server configuration I needed, then told me he would send me a quote and some information about his company. He made no attempt to qualify me at all -- other than knowing I had some Web sites. He eagerly offered to "send me something" without any idea of whether I was interested in changing hosts, what my budget was, or how soon I could make a decision, etc. Then I received following email message from him about a month after he had called me: (Name changed to protect guilty.)
RE: company overview Hi Nick, I just wanted to touch base with you. I haven't spoken to you in awhile, and I just wanted to see if you had any questions. Please let me know, my contact information is below. Best Regards, Albert De Salvo Enterprise Solutions Manager
Since I get email like this just about every day, and since this particular time I had a charitable urge to make a point with this person, I composed following reply:
Dear Albert, Thanks so much for writing! Yes, I do distinctly remember last time we spoke. I don't get many calls so yours is indelibly etched in my mind. In fact, your call was so important, I made a note of our conversation and put it in my tickler file as follows: "Albert from toasterhoster.com called. He had no idea about my needs but that's okay. He works for a big company so I guess that should be enough to impress me.
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