February 09, 2005 | Now even Truste Knows the Equation: FreeIpods.com=FreeSpam.com?

It's a long and sordid tale of affiliate marketing spam, consumer fetishism, onliners obsessed with getting a free lunch by inviting five of thier friends to come to the restaurant and pay so they can then invite five of their friends to come pay for their free lunch tomorrow, and a plodding -- but relentless -- compliance analyst.

Yes, it's hard to believe but TrustE finally pulled its green seal of good privacy housekeeping from the sites of Gratis Internet, the fine folks who unleashed onto the Internet an army of affiliate-link dropping scavengers all seeking the holy grail of modern hip capitalism: the free (and DRM laden) Ipod.

The AP has the story on TrustE's Wedsnesday announcement that it was breaking up with FreeIpods.com, FreeHandbags.com and FreeHDTV.com (among others).

I've little desire to recap my run-in with the ethical forces that run GratisInternet and TrustE, but my experiences with both can be found in this series of postings about their never-ending "permission-based" marketing (1, 2), TrustE's joke of an investigation, and my analysis of Gratis Internet's pyramid-scheme business model (which is legal, mind you).

But suffice it to say that I signed up, got spam, could not stop it, finally got TrustE employee Alexander Yap to investigate, and then "learned" that Gratis Internet hadn't violated their privacy policy, but that TrustE would force Gratis Internet to modify their policy and change some business practices.

That all happened in September,October and November.

Now the AP reports in February that:

TRUSTe said Gratis violated promises involving the protection of children's information and changed how it managed the private information of its customers without adequately notifying them. But TRUSTe said that, due to a confidentiality agreement, it could not disclose exactly how Gratis had violated any agreements.

In a statement, TRUSTe said Gratis had agreed to some changes in its business policies as requested but ''did not complete the entire process.''

Now what the hell that means will remain super-double secret between TrustE and Gratis Internet.

But giving in late night to that old reporting itch, I'm going to do what's known in the trade as "advancing the story."

When TrustE investigated my complaint, they could not find any violation. I ridiculed that assertion and even publicly gave Detective Yap a clue about how to track down who had been given my email address.

Funny thing is I never heard back from Yap.

When the phone rang in November or December, it was a PR flack from Gratis Internet, calling me to say that I was not a crank.

In fact, as I learned over a couple of cordial but mostly off-the-record conversations, I was right.

Gratis Internet had violated its promise never to share email addresses.

They admitted as much.

Though I could never quite get an answer as to how it happened, Gratis Internet said they had found that one of its marketing partners had violated the terms of service and they had terminated their relationship.

Their PR guy swore up and down that Gratis wasn't interested in spamming, that he was not just pimping his company and that they were really, really good guys.

I even got email from one of the principals, Rob Jewell, attesting to their good intentions.

Now, the explanation sounded a little shady, because they never explained how a third party got a hold of my email address when their privacy policy said the company sent emails on behalf of other companies. They also were unable to produce their privacy policy from the time when I originally signed up and they did not tell me which company was the one at fault.

It was also sketchy that they blamed one company, when my emails came from a number of companies.

But since the world is much more interesting than this shady group, I never followed up to find out the real details. I never even blogged the conversations, though the spam did immediately stop.

I have the emails and my notes from the conversation.

I'll post them here for posterity and search crawlers tomorrow.

But I assume that's unneccessary, since I'm so sure the news that a cautious and mostly ineffective third-party privacy group has actually decertified one of its paying customers will convince the free-lunchers of the world -- who used their pulpits and message boards to promote Gratis Internet -- that its time to cease and desist and recant.

But who can take anything on faith or reason anymore?

So I'll be checking the serial Gratis proselytizer Gary Leff's View from the Wing blog to see whether the news is enough to unconvert the willfully blind proselytizers who heralded the ethics of getting the goods of the empire for kind of free at the expense of others and their inboxes.

(Thanks to SSN pal Adam Shostack for pointing me to the AP story.)

Posted by Ryan Singel at February 9, 2005 11:07 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/113