The ad-hoc French organisation 'halte au spam' (stop spam) organised a successful forum on spam in Paris on 3 November. The forum was attended by more than 200 people, including 25 journalists. During the forum an interesting new study was presented about the privacy-dangers of social internet-tools like Plaxo. Plaxo's service invites you to upload your Outlook address book to a central server. The server then sends mails to everybody asking them to update their information.
These kinds of services are very successful, thanks to being free and using viral marketing schemes, but concerns from anti-spam devotees seem justified. For example, the marketing approach is not at all in accordance with the French privacy authority's opinion on sponsorship-based data collection. In the activity report about 2002, the commission recalls that internet users who wish to act as sponsors are to 'get prior consent from their sponsorees, before their personal data is communicated to a company with which they have no relationship. In Belgium this kind of viral marketing is forbidden since March 2003.
A former senior analyst from Forrester Research is quoted in the report to believe that the only way Plaxo can make money is by offering paid spam filters. "These filters would block all incoming e-mail that isn't in your address book. Since the majority of e-mail traffic is with people in your address book your e-mail would be spam free."
Study 'Do social applications pose a threat?' (03.11.2003)
http://www.halte-au-spam.com/social-applications.pdf
(Thanks to Frédéric Aoun, internet consultant, co-organiser Paris Spam Forum)