Who's Sharing Your Personal Info?


I recently got a new electronic gadget, which had a cool program on it, a program that requires registering with the company behind the program. I did that, and then later on I got mail from partners of this company. Even though, when I log in to my account with that company, the opt-in/opt-out privacy checkboxes all say "opt-out," meaning my personal information shouldn't have been shared with that other company.

So I email the company, and the partner's ESP. I ask them, exactly why/how am I receiving this valuable email communication that I don't seem to have opted-in for?

That was just about a month ago, and nobody's telling me anything. It feels like everybody is more interested in passing the buck and telling me that they are taking it seriously and they're looking into it. I don't know why it takes a month to just admit that somebody made a mistake, or that I am wrong and I did consent to this. I'm not going to be all that mad if it was done in error; stuff happens. Maybe this helps them find a programming error, maybe a SQL select statement that doesn't properly respect the opt-in flag. I've been there, trust me.

But the lack of answers is uncool. I guess all I can do is warn all my friends to be sure not to give their personal information to this program or this company.

What would you do if you were in my shoes?
1 Comments

Comments

  1. Dear Al Iverson,

    you ask what *I* would do if I were in your shoes. Let us assume for the moment shoes are not the nifty new electronic device you purchased, and the shoe manufacturer the entity tht shared your address.

    I guess it depends on how important the email is to you. if it is integral to the functioning of the program, i'd try to change the email associated with the program and see if it happens again. Maybe shut down the old one, or feed it to a 3rd-party-marketing measuring tool and evenually out the companies publicly.

    ReplyDelete

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