HP Email Spam
This morning I got a spam email from Hewlett Packard Australia. I define it as spam because it was sent to an email address created purely for a directory entry. The only way to even know this email address existed, was to have harvested it from a web page.
Back in the late 90s a lot of this went on. That’s why today most content management systems will automatically hide an email address in the code so it can’t be harvested automatically. So I was flabbergasted (yes my flabber was completely gasted) when I got the spam email this morning.
The Spam Act 2004 says “Under the Spam Act, it is illegal for unsolicited commercial electronic messages that have an Australian link to be sent, or cause to be sent. A message has an Australian link if it originates or was commissioned in Australia, or originates overseas but has been sent to an address accessed in Australia. The legislation sets out penalties of up to $1.1 million a day for repeat corporate offenders. ”
I’m not a lawyer (thank deity of your choice) but my reading of the above says that HP is breaking the law. So I looked a little closer at the footer of the email and followed the “Why are you receiving this email?” link.
So Reed Business Information was the “marketer” that was responsible for email being sent. Presumably HP is utilising lists created by them. Were they seriously harvesting email addies with bots though? Surely not. Then I read this.
Collection of information
The four main ways we collect personal information about you are:
- when information about you is posted on a RBI website, either by you or by a third party;
- when you log into a RBI website or otherwise submit personal information to RBI;
- when you use a RBI website, in which case our system automatically collects information relating to your visit to that website, such as your IP address; and
- through the operation of CatchBot, RBI’s web crawler (described in more detail below).
That last one caught my eye so I scrolled to the bottom of the page.
CatchBot
CatchBot is the web crawler for RBI. CatchBot investigates websites for publicly available information about companies. CatchBot is not designed to access or index any personal or other information about individuals. However, if any personal information is collected inadvertently through the use of CatchBot, that personal information will be held in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
I don’t know anyone who appreciates spam. Sure we all subscribe to newsletters or other information emails lists but it is OUR decision to subscribe. I would have thought HP would be a lot more sophisticated in their marketing than to blatantly buy spam lists. The really annoying thing about spam is that it passes the costs on to the addressee. Think about if you are on a mobile plan and you get 50 pieces of spam a day. This email was only 10K but that would be 500K/day or 3.5MB / week. Not to mention the annoyance of them cluttering the inbox. The reason that spam has always been so popular for “marketers” is that is very low cost when compared to search marketing or social media or display ads. Sure there is a LOT of waste but it’s cheap. What is the cost of acquisition for spam I wonder.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
