Spam, Spam and More Spam
I try to be careful about who I give my email
address. But just when I think it is safe to give a respected (I
thought) company my
email info, I found out, "Wrong!"
I don't drink Coke any more. I used to be a 'Coke-a-holic' and drank
diet Coke all day and half the night. I don't remember
exactly why I quit drinking Coke, but I did and now I drink tea or
water. I can't say I have noticed any health improvement, but
that's beside the point of this 'rant and rave'.
Although I don't drink Coke any more, my sons do. And since I have
more time, I decided to sign up for the 'My Coke Rewards'
that are on each bottle or carton of Coke.
Now since I don't totally trust any company these days I did use an
alternate email address when I signed up. I used a Gmail
account that hardly ever received any spam. Well, then the spam
began to trickle in to this account. Then the trickle became a
flood. In fact so much started coming in I think Gmail was
over-whelmed and some of it came into my inbox. Everyday the flood
of spam gets bigger.
I wanted to be sure about this, so I made a test. I un-subbed from
every newsletter that was using this email address and re-subbed
using
another email address. No spam is coming to this email address!
The email address that I used to subscribe to 'My Coke Rewards' does
not appear on any website. I belong to a lot of email lists,
but not with this email address. All of the newsletters that were
subscribed to this email address had been subscribed for a long
time and I received no spam. But as soon as I signed up for 'My Coke
Rewards', the onslaught of spam began.
So what am I to think? I think Coke or someone at Coke sold my email
address to spammers! They will say it is one of the 'third
parties' mentioned in their Privacy Policy, located here:
http://www.mycokerewards.com/index.jsp#windowType:help/helpID:4
Unfortunately, this is what happens when folks don't read the site's
Privacy Policy'. If I had read the Privacy Policy, I would
have seen this:
Strategic Partners
From time to time we may enter into a special relationship with
another company that is not owned by or affiliated with The
Coca-Cola Company to provide additional features on this site. These
special relationships may include business partners,
sponsors, and co-branded sites (referred to here as "co-branded
pages"). Any information, including personal information, that
you provide on one of these co-branded pages will be shared with
these third party partners. By participating in activities or
providing your information on these co-branded pages, you also
consent to our providing your personal information to those
third parties. Since these third parties will use your information
in accordance with their own privacy practices, you should
check their Web sites for information regarding their privacy
policies.
Folks, this was letting me know they would share my email address
with who knows who and who knows what they would have
done with it! And since I have no way of knowing who these third
parties are, it is rather useless to tell me to check their
websites for information regarding their privacy policies.
So if you want to sign up for 'My Coke Rewards' or any other 'free'
offer site, don't use your personal email address! I am
abandoning this email address as soon as I am sure I have moved all
of my newsletters to a new address. It has become a spam
address.
As I have said before, many times in fact, 'Nothing on the web is
really free, sooner or later you pay'. I paid by losing a perfectly
good email address! The sad thing is I should have read the Privacy
Policy and I know to do that, but this time I didn't.