Focus On: Privacy

All users had opted-in for third-party mailings. The seller provided the proper paperwork. Legal was shipshape. Till moviechoices.com emailed them, and squared up with a judge. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that recipients had not explicitly permitted the seller to pass on their email addresses to a new buyer. Further, the Authority intoned,"If your mother emails you without calling for permission first, sue her." OKOKOK. The Authority didn't actually say that... or did it?See for yourself at UK Advertising Standards Authority.

The Boss allegedly dropped "Sales Executive #3" a line telling him to backdate a contract, then fax it to HQ. Investigators found it languishing on a SE3's hard drive in the field. Now several Computer Associates ex-execs have dates with the Judge. Chances are good that they won't be backdated. Old email turns up in the darnedest places. Don't send it if you wouldn't want to see it on the front page.

Privacy advos wail while lawmakers bluster. The trigger? US fed courts ruled that email can be tapped. After all, reading other people's mail is bad... isn't it? Of course it is. Unfortunately, reading email without detection is too easy. Almost anybody can do it. Laws will simply give users a false sense of security. Want control of corporate privacy? Maintain your own in-house mail servers. Require message encryption when possible. And teach users... especially execs... that anything they say in an email message can and will be used against them in a court of law.

Sick of competitors' pop-up ads popping up on Beaniacs' computers, L.L. Bean is headed for court. The claim Penney's, Nordstrom, Akins and Gevalia have turned retailing into a swamp by unleashing Gator. Correction. Now it's Claria. Since the name change. You know Gator... Claria. The company that some claim created the spyware business. Users have spent hours trying to dig it out of their computers. Anyway, the Bean says pop-ups confuse and upset folks: "The vast majority of consumers do not know how spyware gets on their computers, do not want to receive pop-up ads, think less of web sites that are plagued by pop-up ads, and do not know how to get rid of the pop-up ads. ...

Maintaining both security and privacy is a challenge when only a third of your trusted partners have firewalls or anti-spam/anti-virus protection. Hackers can harvest your address lists... and worse... by cracking them. If you're a big enough account, you can push smaller ops to up their game. But what if they're so small that they depend on a third party service for email? In our recent survey of email services, we could not find a single service that guarantees the privacy of the correspondent. If you're emailing to a company that uses an outside service... you may as well be megaphoning your thoughts from a rooftop. Company interests and secrets, hopes and dreams ...