Weblog entry #52 for simonw
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#52
Privacy Policies and redirecting URLs
Posted by simonw on Wed 3 May 2006 at 22:40
Registerfly's privacy policy promises they generally won't reveal your data to third parties. So I was somewhat surprised to see that the link to their privacy policy looking something like this;
Streamsend's privacy policy basically says "expect email, expect postal mail, give us your phone number and people will call you as well, and if we find any other way to make money with your details we'll do that as well" (I'm paraphrasing here). Which is honest and too the point, although something of a waste of the minute amount of webspace page allocated to the link (read 'small print').
Of course I'd followed the link in the email marketing from Registerfly (courtesy of streamsend). I guess it is naive to wonder whose privacy policy applies to the data gathered from clicktracker. Had I read the non-HTML version of the email, my mail client would have made the proper links out of the text version, rather than relying on streamsend to do that for me.
"Privacy is dead, get over it".
On the other side of the coin, the nice folks at "aol.NET" are looking at why the emails we send that include clickable links of peoples referrer log entries are being rejected with 554hvusr (your email contains a redirecting URL).
The email does contain exactly the same sort of redirecting URL that the nice folks at AOL claim not to want. Because this is exactly how people came to visit our clients website.
Yet another example that "spam" is not about content, but about context. No doubt AOL will, if they do anything, add yet further complexity by whitelisting the emails we send through some other unique identifier, which will clear some small subset of the false positives being generated, because they don't yet have a better avenue open to them.
http://server1.streamsend.com/newstreamsend/clicktracker.php?
ld=4&cd=101&md=112&ud=848b2cbf7bfc3a64c717e59ea1f43262
&url=https://registerfly.com/info/privacy.php
Streamsend's privacy policy basically says "expect email, expect postal mail, give us your phone number and people will call you as well, and if we find any other way to make money with your details we'll do that as well" (I'm paraphrasing here). Which is honest and too the point, although something of a waste of the minute amount of webspace page allocated to the link (read 'small print').
Of course I'd followed the link in the email marketing from Registerfly (courtesy of streamsend). I guess it is naive to wonder whose privacy policy applies to the data gathered from clicktracker. Had I read the non-HTML version of the email, my mail client would have made the proper links out of the text version, rather than relying on streamsend to do that for me.
"Privacy is dead, get over it".
On the other side of the coin, the nice folks at "aol.NET" are looking at why the emails we send that include clickable links of peoples referrer log entries are being rejected with 554hvusr (your email contains a redirecting URL).
The email does contain exactly the same sort of redirecting URL that the nice folks at AOL claim not to want. Because this is exactly how people came to visit our clients website.
Yet another example that "spam" is not about content, but about context. No doubt AOL will, if they do anything, add yet further complexity by whitelisting the emails we send through some other unique identifier, which will clear some small subset of the false positives being generated, because they don't yet have a better avenue open to them.
Comments on this Entry
Posted by Anonymous (213.164.xx.xx) on Thu 4 May 2006 at 08:18
I hope you complained - what did they say?
I've used registerfly in the past- they charged my credit card without ever providing anything. Luckily Visa sorted that out.
A lot of sites break their privacy policies by using third party stats tools, like Google's urchin. When you ask them, they claim it doesn't break their policy at all, i.e. they haven't even considered that. Oh well.
I've used registerfly in the past- they charged my credit card without ever providing anything. Luckily Visa sorted that out.
A lot of sites break their privacy policies by using third party stats tools, like Google's urchin. When you ask them, they claim it doesn't break their policy at all, i.e. they haven't even considered that. Oh well.
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