Betraying My Trust for a Buck

I was glad to hear from those of you who enjoyed my last post about how I got a new toy and used it to turn a guy into my personal little bitch. It was fun too but what was even better was getting to read what you guys think. I guess not unlike an addict of some kind of course I would have liked to have had more thoughts to read, especially really erotic ones, but you know, this is a good start so I'll take it.

Anyway, I'm pretty mad today. I mad because I can't stand it when someone violates my trust. You know, I trust someone and they go violate that for money and it just pisses me off. Some of you know that I like the subject of money and investing as a little hobby because I believe that no financial planner, mutual fund manager or banker will ever be as interested in making your money work hard for you then you will be. So I decided to educate myself on the subject so I could have my money make more money for me. So far it's worked out pretty well but in the last few days I've discovered a dark and ugly thing that just gets me mad whenever I think about it. See, part of my educational process has been not only to read lots of books and articles, but I also subscribe to the Investors Business Daily online edition as well. I was already mad at them because shortly after I subscribed, I started getting lots of crap in my real mailbox from investing newsletters, financial advisors and all kinds of others. It was pretty clear they had sold my mailing address to who knows how many people. I felt that was a clear violation of my privacy to share that information with others without my permission.

Now I've run into another issue. As if I don't have enough spam already, in the last few days I've been getting a ton of spam emails either with their website or their name in the subject line or in the from line. Now ordinarily if I got spam like this I would think that the spammer is spoofing the from email address to hide their own like the sniveling little cowards they are or to make me more likely to trust the email. After all, chances are my email didn't really come from GeorgeW@Whitehouse.gov. So anyway, that's what I would think in this case too except for two problems. How do the spammers know that I have any affiliation at all with Investors Business Daily and second, the email address I gave when I signed up for my Investors Business Daily subscription was a special one that I setup ONLY for that subscription. I've never used it anywhere else and no outside people would know about it because its on my own server. The spam emails are being sent to that email address, so its pretty clear to me what happened. Either Investors Business Daily decided that it was enough that they sold my mailing address to junk mail spammers, now they want to go sell my email address to assholes doing pump and dump schemes on penny stocks or, as they would probably claim, some disgruntled employee over there decided to make a little extra money so he could buy the "Ass Violator 3000" with swivel vibration action so he sold off all the email addresses in the database. Either way it really pisses me off, not only because its more crap that I have to deal with but also the whole trust violation and privacy issue. If the company did it then they've shot themselves in the foot because for however much money they made from it, they'll lose more in subscriptions. I know I'm seriously rethinking renewing my subscription with them and I'm pretty sure that even if the email spam wasn't the organization, the real mail spam was. This is just bad business you know? You can't violate your customers trust and expect to continue to be able to keep them. Anyway, that's my rant for today, I'll return you to our regularly scheduled programming next time.