December 1, 2005
Please don't use Evite!
I just received a party invitation from a soccer teammate via eVite. That is the surest way to ruin a friendship!
Evite makes it clear from their Web site that they will harvest the emails of recipients of an Evite for spam purposes, see here:
Evite works with third-party advertising companies, sponsors and other companies with whom we do business ("Business Partners") to place advertising on our site and in email communications sent to our registered users and to recipients of invitations, Reminders, and other communications related to the Evite service. Information about your visit to this site, such as number of times you have viewed an ad, may be used to serve advertising to you on this site.
I had the unhappy task of sending this e-mail to my soccer teammate:
I must ask that you not put my e-mail address on any Web site. THis is my own company's e-mail address and it is costly and dangerous for it to be spammed. I don't have some big IT department to handle this problem.Basically, everyone you invited via the evite is now vulnerable to getting spammed!!
It's not like this is the first time this has happened. I received months of "free movie tickets" offers from Yahoo after another teammate entered my e-mail address on a Web site. She also entered my email address on some stupid site showing a dancing monkey. It took two requests to get the idea to her, don't place my e-mail on any Web site!
A fellow blogger notes:
I understand why people like to use Evite. I'm sure it's very convenient for providing party information, directions, and a guest list all in one place. In spite of this, I think the problems with it far outweigh the benefits. These problems mainly revolve around whether or not it's ok to give out the personal information of your friends to a third party, especially one with a privacy policy as questionable as Evite's, or their parent company, Ticketmaster.In other words, when you use Evite, you are "opting-in" all of your friends to potentially be sold and spammed. You agreed to their terms when you used their service, but the people on your invitation list did not, yet they will potentially receive spam all the same. In fact, this is likely one of the reasons for Evite's existence; by now they've got a huge database of confirmed-good e-mail addresses just waiting to be sold to those third-party advertisers.
Basically, here's a rule of thumb: Never provide any e-mail but your own to any Web site. It's that simple.
Ask yourself, why is this Web site offering me a free service and asking for e-mail addresses in return? Your answer should be, quite possibly to harvest e-mails for spam. Please respect the privacy of your friends, family and soccer teammates!
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:16 AM in Culture
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