Yes Ed, We Should Care About SPAM Concerns

There are discussions going on in the Lotus blogging world about SPAM. The basic question posed by "ed underscore brill AT us d0t ibm nospam d0t com" (aka Ed Brill") is whether or not people should be concerned about posting their email addresses on web sites, since spammers are going to get it. Ed feels that it should be a moot point because anti-spam technologies are getting so much better, but alas I think he is missing some very important points here that need to be considered. And these points tie directly into Bruce Elgort's frustrations with DominoFiles.com's bad spammer habits. The bottom line, it is not really about SPAM, it is about PRIVACY concerns.

First, an individual's valid email address is more valuable on the open market then a credit card number obtained illegally. This may seem counter-intuitive, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. When a credit card is compromised, the owners of the card will very quickly cancel the card (assuming they read their statements and know about it). But they will very rarely change their email address because this is part of their identity and is one of their well established communication tools. In many cases, people foolishly put their names in email addresses, which help identify demographic information about the user, making the address more valuable on the open market.

Second, as a community, and I include myself in this, do a very poor job at communicating any sort of privacy policies on our blogs. You might be tempted to say "but these are just our personal blogs". However, the perception and in many cases the reality is that many of our blogs are extensions of our business models. If we do not include a clearly linked privacy policy on any page that gathers information, people can and will lose faith in what we do as a community do to protect information. Some blogs, including Ed's, publish the email addresses as part of any comments submitted. What is the purpose of this? I require email addresses so I can contact people as an off-line follow-up if need be, but I do not publish them. Why? Because an email address is personal, private information that a visitor has voluntarily elected to give me. We do not want to be lumped into the same perception of DominoFiles as people who sell and share the information, and make a false claim that they do not send messages to bloggers.

More "savvy" internet users have sacrificial e-mail address from Yahoo, AOL, GMail, and others for the purposes of on-line transactions. Some people I know that manage their own email services will have vendor specific email addresses such as edamazon@yahoo.com, so they can see where spammers are getting their email addresses from. However, this does not always work because clients of companies such as DominoFiles, as part of their "marketing strategy", will only allow valid company/corporate e-mail addresses to be entered into information request and/or webcast registration forms.

We do need to be concerned with what our visitors and users tell us. If not, we face the loss of our credibility. I, for one, will be starting to include a link to a variation of this privacy policy on all pages of this blog and on all comment forms. I encourage other members of the blogging community to do the same. I also encourage members of the blogging community to either not publish the e-mail addresses of commentors or at the very least give people the option of displaying it (opt-in, not out).

And finally, to DominoFiles.com staff and their customers: You are in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. So get your act together or somebody may just take the time to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Do not try and get by with the statement you gave Bruce Elgort that "no one has ever complained about our emails". That is most likely because people have SPAM fatigue and have either trapped the mail in their filters or just ignore it because they have other things to do. I know I have talked to you on the phone about this issue, so at least two people have.