For Sale: Your Email Address. Serious offers only. Inquire at Advocacy, Inc. - 3,173 Views, 4 Comments
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Political spam has long been considered to be completely immune from any anti-spam law. This is due to the long-cherished constitutional prohibition against the regulation of political speech. If you are a registered voter and haven’t yet received political spam, fear not, you will soon enough. Even sooner, if Advocacy, Inc. has its way. (And if you are over 18 and not a registered voter, shame on you!) Advocacy, Inc., a political “cyber-consultancy” has a list of nearly 25million - you read that right, 25million - email addresses of registered voters throughout the United States, acquired, apparently, in that time-honoured and old-fashioned way: e-pending. And the addresses are freely, openly, and blatantly for sale to politicians and political organizations. Advocacy, Inc. claims to already have more than 60 customers, including sitting legislators, running candidates, and political groups. Those known to have purchased addresses from Advocacy, Inc. include New York Democrat Frank Barbaro, the Pennsylvania tax advocacy group Philadelphia Forward, and the Democratic Party in Arizona. Aunty predicts that many erst-while email marketers may soon make the transition to “political marketer”. So what can you do about it? Aunty suggests that when you get any political spam, you opt-out with extreme prejudice. Don’t just click on the unsubscribe link which, hopefully, should work - but contact the offending sender, and let them know in no uncertain terms that not only do you never want to receive email from them again, and not only had they better expunge your ill-gotten email address from their lists, their database, and their memory, but make clear that the act of spamming you has caused them to not only lose any support which they might otherwise have had from you for them and their cause, but that you will also be very loudly explaining this to anyone who will listen (and if you have a blog or other public forum in which to publish their name and offense, let them know that you will be doing that as well). Remember - it’s supposed to be government by and for the people - not a government which spams its people. Related link here.
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For Sale: Your Email Address. Serious offers only. Inquire at Advocacy, Inc.
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Previous Article « Who are the Earliest Adopters of SPF? Survey says: Spammers!
Read Next Article » News Flash: SpamCop and King of Spam Settle Lawsuit
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>the long-cherished constitutional prohibition against free speech
I believe that, as worded, it has been a more recent development. ;-)
Comment by Danny Goodman — 9/1/2004 @ 9:52 am
Oops! Fixed! Aunty needs some coffee.
Comment by Aunty Spam — 9/1/2004 @ 9:56 am
Definitely — I publish any political spam I get (apart from the several thousand rightwing spams in German a few months ago that is).
http://spamvertized.org/ is a useful resource here, too, if we can persuade whoever runs it to keep it up to date ;)
Comment by Justin — 9/1/2004 @ 11:54 am
Click my website link.
This product can enable a user to
create disposable channels based on their origional address. It automates a channeling process that applies codes to current contacts.
I think this could be the next step in the email securty revolution. Really. If you automatically have codes that create a better way of sender autentication and whitelisting, plus add the benefit of being able to make up an apendage to your email address at any point and it becomes a channel, I think this could really have something.
I am suprised it hasn’t recieved more media attention - I first heard of it a couple weeks ago on http://www.internetweek.com.
Comment by anti spam — 9/2/2004 @ 11:04 am