Faced a similar situation recently. It was both surprising and frustrating.
Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
171–180 of 251 posts
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Any vendor doing this to me goes on a perma-ban list. If they don't respect me before the sale, I'd have no reason to think they'd respect me after.
Why do you think the proactive customer outreach is "not respecting you"? I view it as providing high level of customer service, before and after sales, in B2B space. It is no different than Amazon displaying related products that you might be interested in or Netflix showing you a queue based on your past viewings, in consumer space. For example, if a visitor's company produces widgets and as a vendor we have previo…
The part I find deeply disrespectful, even more than the hella creepy privacy violations, is your notion that I'm incompetent to decide for myself who I need to talk to.
It's not like your web site is hiding the phone number or lacking in other ways for me to contact you. If I look at your website and don't use them, I have decided not to talk to you. It's essentially disrespectful for you to say "Oh, you poor fool, you don't know what you're doing. Clicking once is too hard for you. I'd better call you right away."
And then once the phone rings, we're off to the races with a host of manipulative sales tactics. Whee! Just how I wanted to spend my afternoon.
You try to wrap this manipulation up in the language of helping. But when you sing the praises of "build[ing] the relationship early, quickly and efficiently", you ignore that only one relationship is going to get built; the rest is just a giant waste of time, the very opposite of efficiency. And your last paragraph really gives away the lie. The point of the techniques isn't to help the customer. It's to allow the vendor to dominate a market without respect to actual product quality.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#173I'm not going to wait for legislation to fix problems I can fix myself. You don't want this to happen? Make sure you have ad-blocking and third party tracker blocking on. I go a step further and use 'Quick JS Switcher' for chrome. By default JS is off and I only turn it on for sites I want. The percentage of sites that I turn it on for is minuscule. I'm seriously starting to question why this isn't the default setup…
Surely you must use some SaaS?
Yeah, I whitelist things like github, gmail, etc. But it's a very short list. Everything else loads without JS by default. I can turn it on with a click if I want to so it's a minor inconvenience when I reach a site and I need it. Also, the extension will remember which sites I have turned it on for. I have < 100 sites whitelisted. YMMV.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really pushing the boundaries of the CAN-SPAM act. You're not allowed to send unsolicited emails. You shouldn't be allowed to pretend that visiting a site is a solicitation. Edit: I misunderstood the mechanism of collecting the addresses. This isn't skirting "unsolicited mail", but it is circumventing the ban on harvested email addresses.
> You're not allowed to send unsolicited emails. Sorry, this is completely false information that is easily verifiable by looking at the wikipedia page for the can spam act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Sending_b... > But when sending unsolicited commercial emails, it must be stated that the email is an advertisement or a marketing solicitation.
Sorry, this is completely correct information if you don’t assume that the US in the only country in the world.
For example, Canada’s Bill C-28¹ explicitly prohibits it.
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¹ — http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/canada-s-new-anti-spam-law-ap...
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#175> This transaction breaks a core promise using the internet: just because I visit a website doesn’t mean I consent to getting spam from it. No it doesn't. There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for. I'm not condoning this behavior, but we're in territory that we don't have prior art for. It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to anoth…
> There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for.
Sure there isn't. The internet is just a jungle where predatory animals can hunt you down if you go in their teritory.
They say we've exited from the jungle once, but apparently the jungle is still in us.
Besides ad blockers, we need more plugins to help us mark these animals and keep us away from them.
A nice plugin would be to just remove from your searches all the links to domains known to be involved in spam.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#176I talk a lot about this stuff with a friend doing sales operations at a hyper-growth startup in SF. With Criteo, tools like Reply.io and others he thinks we're going to see an event horizon where recipients of spam say enough is enough and online privacy finally becomes 'cool'.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#177I've been getting more spam lately from "legitimate" companies. One of my email addresses leaked from a major open source project I corresponded with. Harvesters found it and now sell it to every small business and entrepreneur marketer you can think of. I get spam from CDNs, off-shoring companies, SEO/SEM, marketing, you name it. Lots of them use sketchy services like reply.io to make it seem like a real person sent…
I've always pondered sending the following curt response to this type of not-quite- really -spammy (as in Viagra-ads) spam: Fuck off. ...or something even more offensive for greater catharsis, but then I worry it will just cause them to send even more, knowing that the address is "live".
Since I run my own mailserver, I can put in filters to give errors out at the SMTP level (rather than bounces), so I have stuff like this in my access file for egregious spammers (from legit companies):
ERROR:550 You've been banned from sending spam to this address, spamming bastard!!
And yeah, swearing at spambots is oddly cathartic.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#178> This transaction breaks a core promise using the internet: just because I visit a website doesn’t mean I consent to getting spam from it. No it doesn't. There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for. I'm not condoning this behavior, but we're in territory that we don't have prior art for. It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to anoth…
> There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for. Sure there isn't. The internet is just a jungle where predatory animals can hunt you down if you go in their teritory. They say we've exited from the jungle once, but apparently the jungle is still in us. Besides ad blockers, we need more plugins to help us mark these animals and keep us away from them. A n…
At this point a plugin probably isn't enough. We need a better browser that gets back to the document viewing roots. Something better than NoScript that has a rough idea of the types of transforms a domain's JS performs so that it can serve me the "page" w/out running suspicious code. Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for. Sure there isn't. The internet is just a jungle where predatory animals can hunt you down if you go in their teritory. They say we've exited from the jungle once, but apparently the jungle is still in us. Besides ad blockers, we need more plugins to help us mark these animals and keep us away from them. A n…
At this point a plugin probably isn't enough. We need a better browser that gets back to the document viewing roots. Something better than NoScript that has a rough idea of the types of transforms a domain's JS performs so that it can serve me the "page" w/out running suspicious code. Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.
> Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.
Then so be it. Apparently life is an arms race..
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#180This is why I have the username part of my email address tailored to each site/service I register with. So I have a hackernews@example.org, amazon@example.org, etc. Human beings get my real email though (because it would be weird if I told John Smith to email me at johnsmith@example.org). If people start abusing this (politicians do this a lot), I can just block say timkaine@example.org, and never hear from them or p…
This breaks "i forgot my password" links years later when you forget what tag you used to sign up at some rarely-used service. I stopped doing it.
FWIW, I've been doing this for about 15 years and I've never had that trouble. I tend to keep the same system for customizing emails so I can guess my username in one or two tries. But using a password manager has completely eliminated even that.