October 10, 2004 | TRUSTe logo not worth the pixels it is printed in

As some of you might know I've been on a bit of a tear about the spamming practices of FreeIpods.com.

I tried to stop their "marketing messages", but my efforts failed -- despite giving the spammers at Gratis Internet a whole week to remove my email address from their spam directory. (I won't even get into the absurdity of their insistence it takes a week to remove an email address in light of the fact it only takes the company two hours to start their marketing barrage.)

So I turned to TRUSTe, a company that makes its money by "monitoring" privacy policy compliance and providing a cute little green icon to reassure people who visit a website that the site's privacy policy actually means something.

FreeIpods.com prominently displays the TRUSTe logo on the front page of their website.

My case fell into the hands of a TRUSTe employee named Alexander Yap.

Now, FreeIpods.com's privacy policy says that the company only sends out emails on behalf of other companies.

That means that they never give out email addresses to other companies.

So when I opted out, as I did on September 1, all the spam should stop at once.

Amazingly enough that did not happen. I continue to get spam from FreeIpods.com affiliates every day.

(If you do want that to happen, I think you might be able to reach FreeIpods.com co-owner Mr. Robert Jewell at 202-595-9123 ext.712. or rob@gratisinternet.com)

But according to Mr. Yap, after his very thorough investigation, he found that FreeIpods.com did not violate their privacy policy, despite the fact that 1) I opted out and 2) I still get spam at the address I signed up from.

Here's what Yap had to say:

The investigation involved interviews with the company as well as an anonymous duplication of your experience with the Web site. The results of our investigation indicate that Gratis Internet did not violate their privacy policy. TRUSTe did, however, work with them to strengthen and clarify their privacy statement. Additionally, as a result of our investigation, Freeipods.com added a more robust disclosure notice at the point of email address collection...

Unfortunately, you will have to contact the individual companies that are sending you spam in order to be removed from their lists.

TRUSTe now considers this complaint closed.

Now, Yap found that FreeIpods did not violate their privacy policy, which prohibits the company from sharing my email address with other companies.

Yap continues on to then say that despite having opted-out, I have to play whack-a-mole with these other "individual companies" spamming me.

One has to wonder then how these companies got my email address if FreeIpods.com did not share it.

Yap now considers this complaint closed.

That's funny. Because I now consider TRUSTe a toothless, paid apologist for spammers and liars.

I guess that makes Yap and I even.

Posted by Ryan Singel at October 10, 2004 11:50 PM