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FastMail Forum All posts relating to FastMail.FM should go here: suggestions, comments, requests for help, complaints, technical issues etc. |
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18 Apr 2018, 08:23 PM | #46 | ||
Member
Join Date: Nov 2014
Posts: 39
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Quote:
People tend to draw a line between technical sharing, often essential to provide services to customers (hosting your servers at a provider like I mentioned, monitoring error reports like you mentioned, etc.), and sales/marketing/advertising-related sharing, which has acquired a bad name due to various unscrupulous actors abusing it and causing various problems to people whose information has been shared. Neither you nor I can do much to change this difference in perception, and I don't see how its existence can come as a suprise to you. Even if your selected survey company is the most honest one on Earth, using their services is hardly essential for providing services to your customers; and I think we've already established that you had the option to use them without disclosing email addresses, and elected to do what you did the way you did out of convenience, not real need. You can bemoan "consent extremism" as much as you like, but you're likely still going to have to comply with the GDPR at least as far as your European customers go. I'm reasonably certain that what you did in this case runs counter to what you're allowed to do with personal information under those regulations, and people's email addresses are classified as personal information. Quote:
If there's something in your officially published policies that already covers the case of making people's log-in addresses available to third parties in marketing context, then I think you should probably hilight that section so people don't miss it. If you want to be your run-of-the-mill "we reserve the right to share everything we know about you with our partners so that we can make more money" company, that is obviously your choice. I, personally, would like your company more (and remain a customer longer) if I saw you giving all this a bit more due diligence. EDIT: I do actually appreciate the fact that you're going to document what you share, I just don't know why you have to frame this as a concession to "extremists" rather than simply a good idea in general. Last edited by walpurg : 18 Apr 2018 at 08:51 PM. |
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18 Apr 2018, 08:31 PM | #47 | |
Essential Contributor
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: Scotland
Posts: 483
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Quote:
I don't think that's what the issue is here. I think you really haven't grasped how those of us who use the primary email address JUST as a login and never for sending email feel about that value being exposed. Don't get me wrong, knowing that I can change that value helps a lot. Would you give a username for one of your internet banking accounts to anyone else? Would you be happy with a bank who gave such a username to a survey company? I /do/ get newsletters from you, and enjoy reading them. But you send those to my 'secondary contact' email address, not the primary one, thank goodness. |
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19 Apr 2018, 04:29 AM | #48 |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,087
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I do not think I am a consent extremist. However, passing my account information to a survey company (whether for money or other benefit) is something I would expect the ability to explicitly allow or disallow. That is exactly the kind of company I do not wish to have my private data unless I have vetted them myself. Your assurance that you found their declared privacy policy to be acceptable is not sufficient. You have elected to risk my private data because it saves FastMail money and resources.
Possibly leaking some data accidentally to a service whose main business is not about data collection and marketing is a totally different matter. There, it would be nice to know the services you use and how you use them, but they do not really concern me. |
19 Apr 2018, 06:03 AM | #49 | |
Junior Member
Join Date: Apr 2018
Posts: 2
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Quote:
I have my own domain and I use Fastmail for its email-hosting. I ONLY give out email addresses based on my own domain. I NEVER give out my @fastmail.com address. That one I keep strictly private and use it only as my Fastmail login username. I have never consented to anyone having that email address but you have taken it upon yourself to give it to a third party against my wishes and invalidating that extra bit of security I had in place. And then you post demeaning responses to the people who complained about it. That's incredible. That's how successful businesses die from self-inflicted wounds. |
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19 Apr 2018, 01:04 PM | #50 |
Member
Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 67
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As stated from your privacy policy.
"Data mining and profiling We do not sell or give information about our users to any third parties." You lied to your business customers. |
26 Apr 2018, 07:55 AM | #51 |
Master of the @
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: USA
Posts: 1,077
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There is a basic point here
Free accounts give out your information to pay for the account usage With a paid account the subscriber pays to keep his information private not to be given out as they pay for their usage Some services here have closed rather than share user information even with Government entities There as been a very big error done here |
22 May 2018, 07:40 PM | #52 | |
Cornerstone of the Community
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Oxfordshire, UK
Posts: 603
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Quote:
...but the point here is that the OP's email address/ID was given to a 3rd party without his/her consent which is a breach of trust that I find quite disturbing. ...that Brong doesn't (appear to) understand this - as the CEO of FM - is even more troubling. J. |
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24 May 2018, 11:38 PM | #53 |
Member
Join Date: Jun 2008
Posts: 49
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I don't understand the issue here. When you create an account with Fastmail, you agree to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The Privacy Policy clearly states that, among other things, Fastmail can share your personal information with third parties who help them manage their business and deliver services. A company running an internal survey for them fits well within "third parties who help the company manage their business".
https://www.fastmail.com/about/priva...onal-analytics |
25 May 2018, 03:10 AM | #54 |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 2,616
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GDPR is here!
The FastMail Blog:
https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/05/24/gdpr-is-here/ New privacy policy may be of interest to those who like reading the small print. |
25 May 2018, 07:08 AM | #55 |
Master of the @
Join Date: Feb 2017
Location: USA
Posts: 1,717
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Maybe this is a topic for a different thread, but it seems to me there is a lot of hype around GDPR being generated by companies that stand to gain some business by supplying compliance services to other companies. For example, here in the USA a very small, very local nonprofit I work for received urgent notices from several tech suppliers about all sorts of things we must do immediately to be in compliance, yet my reading of the GDPR indicates we would be exempt. We don't solicit anyone in Europe--in fact we don't really do it outside of our state. As far as I can tell we do not have a single person in our database based in Europe. But, just assume that someone for some reason decided to send us a check from Europe. That would instantly put us in non-compliance, if what I read is correct. So, how or why would European regulators bother to go after us? We are totally based in the USA, with no operations of any sort outside the USA. It seems like some are implying that we are still required to comply with EU law, which I can guarantee you probably 90% of USA companies do not and probably will not. Nonprofits here in the USA are probably 95% non compliant. For those in Europe, imagine if the USA passed a law that said anyone who wants to sell anything into the USA must now register as a US company, or some other silly law like that. Imagine the uproar!
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25 May 2018, 08:42 AM | #56 |
Essential Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: UK
Posts: 270
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The USA already has such a silly law, with which everybody in the rest of the world is expected to comply.
It's called the Helms-Burton Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms-Burton_Act |
19 Jun 2018, 02:12 PM | #57 |
Member
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Eastern US
Posts: 48
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I have been a Fastmail customer for a number of years. Needless to say, I'm rather disturbed at the allegations made in this thread, even though I personally never received any surveys.
Like others who have posted on this thread, I use my login strictly for ... just that: logging in. I get ZERO emails sent directly to my login. All of my "public" emails are aliases, which can be deleted or filtered as necessary. Isn't not having your info made public the whole point of choosing Fastmail (or for that matter, any of the other privacy-oriented services) over something like G-Mail? I don't know if this is easily accomplished, but If FM is going to do customer research, then why not find a way to "anonymize" the data so that the survey company never sees the actual logins? I would become "customer 12345", for example. As for my trust in third parties... let's just say I that I remain skeptical. Let's hope they have learned from their mistakes, and can move forward. Just my two and 1/2 cents. |
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