Quote:
Originally Posted by oblonsky
A few years ago when I was a VM customer (on BT now) I started to get a large amount of spam, so I created a new email address and it was fairly unique and personal to me. After a while, that too got a large amount of spam, so I created a new email address, something along the lines of agkf72hd9@virgin.net.
When this started to get spam I accused VM of harvesting customer email addresses, which they obviously denied. |
Be aware that dictionary attacks do occur and that even addresses that haven't been created yet can get spam - which of course starts as soon as the address goes live. If your address is an alphanumeric combination it can easily be created on a purely random basis by software designed to churn out all possible combinations of digits and letters for popular domains like hotmail, btinternet.com etc.
The receipt of spam on an email address is not itself proof that the address has been passed to a third party.
Also be aware that anyone you ever emailed using that address, has that address on their machine, and if they get infected by an email harvesting bit of malware, will be responsible for that address getting harvested. (which is why I hate round robin emails that put my address along with a hundred others in the Cc or To fields).
From what you have said it is not clear that VM sold your address.
---------- Post added at 22:39 ---------- Previous post was at 22:35 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank
Yes they are a bit vague on "Opt Out" aren't they?
If you look at all their communications they are almost too obviously averse to using those two actual words.
They say customers can choose to "Opt In" but to opt out customers will select "not to take part".
This is marketing at work, PR... It helps obfuscate and complicate not opting in. It's minor and some would say pedantic but but every little helps in their naughty mission on the marketing front! (IMHO)
Hank
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There is a paper waiting to be written, collecting all the deliberately vague things that BT have said or avoided saying about this wretched technology. But we're not stupid! What they don't seem to realise is that their customers have been treated to so much BS over the years that we have developed advanced sensitivity to it and can detect it at a thousand yards. Like when any marketing type uses that word "experience" - as in traffic interception experience, overseas outsourced linguistic obstruction experience, call waiting experience, automatic voice messaging frustration experience etc etc etc.