Making Light:  Political spam ::: August 28, 2005, 11:21 PM

Tina:

  I don't think they ever made any kind of public statement amounting
  to "Whoops, our bad," no.  But offering an easy way to change email
  preferences and sticking to those preferences is at least a tacit
  acknowledgement they needed such a system.

What email preferences?  I've never expressed any preferences to
Amazon, nor done any business with them, nor given them my e-mail
address or name.  I've avoided doing so based on reports of them
sending spam some time ago.  It sounded like Amazon acquired some
e-mail addresses in some other way than by the addressees asking for
e-mail from Amazon, and then sent spam to those addresses.  I have not
been able to confirm or refute such reports.  As long as they don't
acknowledge those reports or repudiate the practice, there's no reason
to suppose they won't scrape my address of Making Light and send me
spam tomorrow.

I've looked at their web site and seen their nice big link to a
privacy policy.  It says their customers have rights not to get
unwanted e-mail from Amazon.  They don't seem to acknowledge that I,
a non-customer, have any rights at all.  I'm not looking for them to
deny that they f pigs, I just want them to say they don't send spam.

Do you think I should become a customer with spam houses in order to
use their easy way to express my preference not to receive spam?  How
many spam houses should I go through this with?  My impression is that
any such attempt at expressing my preferences would get me more spam,
not less.