It has become clear over the years that companies do not value your private information.  If I got one or two of these a year, it would be one thing, but I get multiple per day which means it is happening 10s of thousands of times per day.

Why is this a big deal? Companies do not treat your personal information with any care. Companies do not respond to people who try to inform them that they have the information incorrectly. So, the only alternative is to post (without individual’s personal information) the emails that they send.

The problems:

1. Companies do not verify that an email address is yours and so share your information with the world.

2. Companies do not give a method of reporting that they are sending email to the wrong address.

3. Companies state they have a privacy policy, but ignore it.

After spending an hour on the phone with ATT to let them know they were sending someone else’s account information to me and being told that “someone must have accessed [my] email account” in order to have it entered in the ATT database, talking with 7 people only to finally have someone understand the issue and disable that email, we’ll be posting a number of emails per day from companies that do not bother to care for your private information.

We’ll be posting examples daily.  I always try to email back or spend a minute or two contact them to fix their problems, but usually without success.  Since there is no way to contact the companies or the people, we’ll post it here in the hopes that both the people involved and companies will fix their problems.

Some suggestions for companies that want to earn the trust of consumers:
1. Before sending an important email to an address, email addresses should be confirmed.
2. Confirmation emails should include both a “confirmation” link and a link to indicate that the address is wrong.
3. Further emails should include a link to indicate that the address is not correct.

Companies that email us should be aware that doing so subjects them to our terms and conditions:
Remember that if you email us, you MUST accept our terms and conditions.

Any messages and any attachments (with this “message”) are intended solely for the
addressees (which obviously must include the email addresses that emails are addressed to)
and may contain confidential or privileged information. You acknowledge that we may try to attempt to contact you to notify you that you have sent us mail incorrectly, but that if you provide a fraudulently incorrect email address we can not do so.

If you address emails to us, you acknowledge that we are the intended recipients of the email by your own admission and that you grant us rights to publish the email in full or in part in order to bring attention to your inability to keep personal information private.

Update: after getting 10 in one day, I couldn’t keep up, so am rethinking how best to make companies aware that they are doing a poor job protecting privacy.