I am quite surprised about the lack of respect for privacy and anti-spam laws that many startups are showing nowadays, with the excuse that being social and web-two-d0t-ohish gives them carte blanche to jump over all the hoops. Today’s case: Twitxr.
A friend got this in his inbox:
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Martin Varsavsky wants to keep up with you on Twitxr
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 01:01:07 +0000 (UTC)
From: Twitxr
Reply-To: no-reply@twitxr.com
To: notshown@nospam.com
See Martin Varsavsky’s pictures:
http://twitxr.com/martinvars
Thanks,
The Twitxr team – http://twitxr.com
About Twitxr
With twitxr you can share a moment, a picture, a thought, instantly with your mobile phone. Where are and what are you doing your friends now? Twitxr tells you.
To start with, the email address this was sent to is from an old company he worked at, and which has not been used for over three years. It seems that Martin has just taken his list of email addresses, containing anyone who he has ever been in touch with, and copy/pasted them into the Twitxr database. Secondly, the email comes from a no-reply email address, and provides no way to unsubscribe from these communications. In fact, this email was not even used to subscribe to a Twitxr account!
Now, I believe there are many laws in Europe and the US that prevent this. We currently use a mailing list platform that requires us to comply with many regulations and provisions, so I know for a fact that it’s not as simple as copying a bunch of emails into a database and clicking ’send’.