McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

30GB iPod: Now with more spam!

On March 23, New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer sued Gratis Internet for allegedly selling its users’ personal information in violation of its own privacy policies. Gratis, better known to consumers as freeipods.com (and freepay.com), has received plenty of media attention, much of it focused on whether consumers actually receive any iPods. By contrast, Spitzer focused on the alleged sale of customers’ e-mail addresses that, his office says, resulted in torrents of spam.

It was the second action involving Gratis in as many weeks. On March 14, Spitzer’s Internet Bureau, led by Ken Dreifach, settled a case against Datran Media, an e-mail marketing firm that was accused of buying lists of personally identifiable information (PII) that it knew were in violation of the seller’s privacy policy. One of the primary sellers of that PII? Allegedly, Gratis Internet.

The two cases were big news on the Web. And that gave us an idea. What if we did a search for free iPods cross referenced with our test results? What would we find? To the data.

Dripping Red

Here’s the first page of my “free iPod” search on Google today:

Shop Here Free is running a free iPod offer. When we signed up, we got 64 e-mails per week. Gift Fiesta is also offering a shot at a free iPod. During a recent crawl of one of their sites, we enjoyed a 21 pop-up fiesta. (Our e-mail testing in still in progress. We’re not hopeful.) The results of our Survey Networks' sign-up were relativly painless. We got just 18 e-mails per week, on average. By contrast, Lookdog’s whopping 170 e-mails per week left our inbox with a permanent hangdog look.

And what about Gratis? The top organic result from our search was freeipods.com, Gratis’ re-direct to freepay.com.

So, aside from a brush with an Elliot Spitzer lawsuit, what does a sign-up with a Gratis site get you? We know that when we signed up here, our inbox looked like this:

The 11 e-mails per week we got from freepay.com and its advertisers is hardly a record for us. But how many potential free iPod customers would click ‘yes’ if they knew their inbox would look like this?

The Shame of It All

Web commentary about Gratis and Datran ranged from "told you so" to "shame on me." One journalist was livid:

I’m removing my referral links to these scumbags...Gratis lied to me for the story I wrote originally about the company, which did wonders for their early credibility, and then lied again for a follow-up story I wrote about its privacy practices…

That said, it seems that word still hasn’t gotten around. Here’s a guy trying to help a cash-strapped friend get a free ipod for her daughter. Two weeks after Spitzer’s I-Team filed the Gratis suit, you can still find folks who'll try anything for a chance at a freebie.

Affirmative Action

We’ll see what happens with the Gratis action. As for Datran, at least good guys won, right? The seemingly far-reaching agreement requires Datran to hire a Chief Privacy Officer who will presumably be the one to:

* Independently review all applicable privacy policies…governing PII
* Independently confirm that…consumers affirmatively opted in to permit such sharing

Has anyone ever met anyone who affirmatively opted in to have their personal information shared in such a way that their inbox filled up with pharmaceutical, mortgage and work-at-home e-mail?

We worry that the concept of affirmative opt-in is poorly defined. For example, does affirmative opt-in apply if a site notifies users on the forty seventh paragraph of a 10,000 word Terms & Conditions document that by clicking "I agree" the user purportedly consents to receive product offerings from 3rd party providers? Does the average user have any idea what "product offerings from 3rd party providers" means? That this is just a complicated way of saying “advertisements” or, less politely, spam? We think these euphemisms and hidden disclosures are bad for consumers. But we worry courts may be unduly deferential to users' supposed "consent."

We remain skeptical that government action alone will solve this problem. We’ll see if Datran honors the agreement. Even Quixote, the eternal optimist, demanded that the "the proof of the pudding is the eating." For us, the proof will be in our inboxes. Or rather, our empty inboxes will be proof that the agreement is being honored.