Jigsaw.com Refuses to Remove Your Unauthorized Contact Information from Their Pay-for-Play Databases

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We’ve talked in the past about Jigsaw.com, the site that encourages people to sell them your personal contact information (you give someone your business card, they log into www.jigsaw.com and literally get paid to rat you out by selling Jigsaw your contact info). Now it turns out that they will not remove your contact information, even if you request that they do so.

To refresh your memory, in our earlier particle about Jigsaw.com, we explained that:


If you have ever given your business card to a Jigsaw user, odds are that your contact information is already in there. Oh, and people who want to access your contact information have to pay for it, $1.00 per contact. That’s right, Jigsaw is selling your contact information – the very information which you never authorized them to have in the first place….

…Here is how it works:

Joe Schmoe signs up to be a JigSaw user. He can either pay $25.00 a month for access to the Jigsaw database of contact information, or he can contribute a minimum of 25 new contacts a month, and receive his own access for free. And remember, once Joe enters your contact information into the Jigsaw database, any Jigsaw user can access it, provided they are willing to pay the $1.00. Now here is where it gets even more interesting: for every business contact which Joe has entered, if another Jigsaw user buys it, Joe gets a dollar. And all, apparently, without your permission.

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Ok, got the background?

Now, what happens if someone gives your information to Jigsaw – or, as apparently is happening, Jigsaw goes out and just finds whatever info it can on you – and creates a listing for you, with all of your contact information, for all of their users to exploit – Oh, the better to spam you with, my pretty! ?

It turns out that Jigsaw will not remove your listing from their database!

That’s right. There is no way to get them to remove you!

This is exactly what a colleague of ours found out, the hard way.

As they explain it, they received a solicitation telephone call on their cell phone, and when they asked the sales person how he had found their cell phone number, he was happy to share that he got it from Jigsaw.com.

So our colleague goes and looks themselves up on Jigsaw, and sure enough, there is an unauthorized listing for their company, listing their private cell phone number as the contact number.

Here, in their own words, is what happened next:

I wrote to their support department about the issue: remove my cell phone number. No problem, they said: write to the privacy department. (Apparently them actually forwarding my message to the privacy department was out of the question.) So I wrote to them, and they said sure, we can replace it — what’s the main business number? I told them there is none, just remove it. “But it’s a required field”, they wrote back. “So remove my company’s entry entirely”, I said. I didn’t ask to be listed in the first place.

Their reply:

We’re sorry, but cannot fulfill the request to remove your company from Jigsaw. Company information is typically free and open from a variety of sources.

So, Jigsaw.com’s policy is to scrape your contact information, sell it to people, making money off your contact information, and to refuse to remove your listing even when you ask.

Heck, even Google doesn’t go that far!

The two saving graces are that a) apparently you can update your listing, and so far as we know there is nothing stopping you from giving them an old telephone number that no longer works, or your childhood address.

The other thing is that if you sign up, you can actually see who it was that ratted you out to them, so that you can exact a fitting ‘reward’.

In poking around on the Jigsaw site, we saw two things of interest that were not there the last time we investigated Jigsaw. The first, which really says a lot, is that “Jigsaw is a certified licensee of the Direct Marketing Association’s Safe Harbor Program.”

The second, which is even more insidious (and, even, dare we say sinister) is that:

“Jigsaw has entered into a Business Transition with salesforce.com. As a result, any information collected about you on or through this website may be shared with salesforce.com or its affiliates.”

Is anyone out there brave enough to spin this one out to its natural conclusion?

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13 thoughts on “Jigsaw.com Refuses to Remove Your Unauthorized Contact Information from Their Pay-for-Play Databases

  1. I wrote to Jigsaw over 1 week ago asking to be removed from their “database.” It’s one week later, and I have STILL not been removed. Nor have I received any reply from Jigsaw. The only thing I’ve received is an automated “trouble ticket received” message.

    It takes Jigsaw more than one week to remove people?! Very sketchy! This is an unethical comany that whores other people’s information out to the highest bidder. Even worse, I cannot opt-out using the link above, since I no longer work for the company I’m linked to. Apparently, whoever added me, used my work email address. Since I’m no longer working for the company they’ve linked me to, I can’t opt-out. Support is non-responsive.

    This company deserves a class-action lawsuit filed against them!

  2. This page is badly outdated and reminds me of a biased smalltown newspaper. You can remove your info from Jigsaw. It does not pay people to submit your info, it gives you credits so you can download others contact info. This is a tool (like email) it can be used for good (cleaning your old database) or bad (spamming people). Stop trying to label the tool as the problem. Its how you use it…

  3. I don’t blame jigsaw for the lack of homework of the marketer. I do blame jigsaw for making it difficult for people like me to remove their listings, while wrapping themselves in a cloak of privacy promises.

    @Granbit we’re not going to change each others’ minds, I’m done arguing now.

  4. Don’t blame Jigsaw for the lack of homework done by someone trying to generate leads. If they don’t find companies listed in Jigsaw, they can go to any Chamber of Commerce website and get the same information. Or how about www.yp.com? You better start growing multiple appendages for the number of fingers you’re going to need in order to point blame for someone cold-calling you.

  5. Why wouldn’t I want my business listed? Because slimy marketers use Jigsaw to cold-call my business and waste my time offering me radio ads for my web sites (talk about dinosaur mentality.)

  6. Are you guys NOT READING what happened? This isn’t made up – this is email *from* Jigsaw to the party. They clearly wrote “We’re sorry, but cannot fulfill the request to remove your company from Jigsaw. Company information is typically free and open from a variety of sources.” And the company information they had was a *cell phone*.

  7. One more thing, Jigsaw has not paid cash for a contact in at least 4 years. They operate on a point system. You get points for entering in contacts, you spend points by obtaining someone else’s contacts.

  8. The author could not be more clueless about Jigsaw.
    1. Anyone, at any time, can contact support @ jigsaw dot com, and request to be removed from Jigsaw. After removal, if another user comes along and tries to enter in the removed email address, you will receive a message that states something to the effect that the “contact does not want their contact information listed on Jigsaw.”
    2. Mobile phone numbers are banned on Jigsaw.
    3. Why on Earth would you not want your business listed? Besides LinkedIn, Jigsaw has quickly become one the most crawled websites by Google. In the interest of SEO, you business would be getting “free” exposure. Also, as a user of Jigsaw for the past 5 years, I have closed multiple 6-figure deals from the contacts I obtained from Jigsaw. If you’re a business owner, wouldn’t you want your sales team using Jigsaw?
    4. Personal email addresses and home phone numbers are banned from Jigsaw.
    5. This is the 21st century. We live in an online, data accessible world. Let go of the dinosaur mentality and accept the fact that Jigsaw is here to stay. I have found Jigsaw to be the most accurate, user-friendly contact database in the market. I have used Hoover’s, OneSource, and others. Nothing comes close to the amount of information available to users. Best of all, it’s all maintained by the user community!

  9. Are you kidding me? Clearly this person that is posting this has never taken the time to visit www.jigsaw.com and understand how it really works. There is an automatic removal system to remove yourself. When you are entered, an e-mail is sent to your e-mail address that offers you the opportunity to remove yourself or update your information. Company data is free and publically available. Do you have a store? Do you have a buisness name? Guess what… what you find in Jigsaw is no different than what you find in Google, except it’s accurate. I would even go so far to say that the poster uses their “personal cell phone” as the number for the business. Do you have business cards? Guess what.. that’s the same info you will find in Jigsaw. You hand those out by the hand-ful don’t you?

    It’s clear you are not in sales, marketing, or recruiting or you would see the true value and power of Jisgaw. I’d tell your colleague to check his facts before ranting

  10. They DO NOT allow cell phones and have software in place to verify if it is a landline or mobile phone.

  11. They’ll remove you as a person using that form, but they won’t remove your tiny company if you don’t want it listed. And they won’t remove a mobile phone number unless you replace it with a “main business line” — even if your tiny business doesn’t need to accept calls from the world at large.

  12. Clearly the person in the article had a different experience than “You can directly remove yourself”.

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