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.