Flashes of Panic

So, after I left a voice-mail message for MacMall regarding the spam I got at an address I’d given to them, today I got a call back.

First he tried to refer me to the privacy policy on their website. I let him know I had already read it. The privacy policy clearly states, he said, that we may share your email address with partner companies. I asked if his partner companies were usually selling prescription drugs. Well, he said, perhaps the partner company let the address leak to the company engaged in the shady sales of pharmaceuticals. I asked if perhaps the terms under which they rented or exchanged email addresses to partner companies forbade those secondary companies from further distributing the address. He didn’t know. I suggested that perhaps he look in to that. Throughout the call, he was resolutely unapologetic; his basic line was, it’s all right there in the privacy policy.

So, a few direct lessons from this episode:

• MacMall’s privacy policy can be condensed to, “We may sell your email address to spammers.”
• MacMall does not pay particularly close attention to the terms under which they share their customers’ personal information. Therefore, anything you share with MacMall, you share with spammers.
• MacMall will allow you to opt out from receiving mail from them (I did this long ago) but you can’t opt out of mail from their partners. I think this may be illegal, actually.

From these I can reach a few more conclusions:

• MacMall doesn’t care about spam.
• MacMall’s privacy policy is a fig-leaf. If it wasn’t considered standard operating procedure to have one, they wouldn’t.
• Since MacMall is earning revenue by sharing the email addresses of its customers in such a way that they fall in the hands of spammers, MacMall is profiting from spam as defined by the CAN-SPAM law. It’s not unreasonable to say that they are in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of that law—and if they’re not in violation of the letter, it’s because of their lobbyist buddies, the DMA, friends of junk mailers and spammers everywhere.

I suppose it should go without saying that I’m not buying from MacMall any more? I’d encourage you to do the same, and stay clear of their alter ego, PC Mall, as well. If you don’t like their privacy policy, don’t buy, and this company’s privacy policy would be improved if they’d scraped up some roadkill from the highway and posted that instead.

I’m not the first to figure this out, either.

Now Playing: No Surprises from OK Computer by Radiohead