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Rent or sell names? Not yours - Never!

It has come to our attention that some merchants are informing Catalog Choice Members that we are renting or selling names to other organizations.  Some claim that this is their reason for not participating in our free service.

THIS INFORMATION IS FALSE.

We only send your name and address to the merchants you set your mail preference for.  We do not get paid by the merchants for delivering your opt-out request.  The merchants are not permitted to rent or sell your name if Catalog Choice provides it to them.

Furthermore, we do not share your email address with any of the merchants.

If you have been informed that we are selling or renting names, please let us know.  If you are told that we engage in this practice, please refer the merchant to this blog post.

Thanks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Catalog Choice, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Rent or sell names? Not yours - Never!”

  1. Well, in your last blog post you linked to the DMA letter. It falls short in accusing you of selling your lists only by not mentioning you by name. It looks like the DMA is the one telling companies this.

    Joe on July 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am

  2. Last year, a very nice catalog rep gave me a bit of advice, request to whomever I was calling to opt out not to “Share/Sell/Rent” my mailing info…Many were DMA Merchants members as printed on their catalogs. I do think the blantant sharing/selling & renting continued on because of the Mail Preference Clause listed in the center section of their catalogs-It already happened!

    CC.org: you’ve been online a year? I don’t believe for a minute you have sold lists. So far this month two unwanted catalogs. It’s taken DMA 36 years to create part of this mess as they provide our mailing info to a variety of mail suppliers other than catalogs and do not take responsibility. I still won’t join DMA they are not reliable and do not care about the consumer per their letter. They care about $$$$ and not the ever growing delicate environment.
    CC:org, you need to go National news to get that 1 Million mark.

    Joe, Thank you for reading the DMA letter, I got the same impression as well.

    I’m not employed with CC.org just a concerned consumer. DMA is just on a smut campaign afraid to lose their control on the consumers desires - the ones that really count.

    Yvonne Camesi on July 14th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

  3. I would like to find some way to communicate with the DMA leadership to let them know that, from now on, I will ONLY shop with merchants who offer opt-outs with CC.org. I will boycott any outfit that sends me an unwanted catalog which I did not order and cannot refuse.

    Peggy on July 15th, 2008 at 11:48 am

  4. It is most likely this…

    The DMA’s position is that it is not telling its members not to participate with Catalog Choice, said Donn Rappaport,
    chairman and CEO of the American List Counsel Inc. and chairman of the DMA Board of Directors. However, the DMA is
    advising its members to ask Catalog Choice some very important questions before deciding to work with its service. For
    example, he asked, why does Catalog Choice insist on retaining the names of people who have signed up for the service?
    Rappaport said that the DMA had met with Catalog Choice to talk about ways that the two organizations could work
    together, but discussions broke down over this issue.

    bill on July 15th, 2008 at 5:22 pm

  5. Bill:

    We create accounts for our users for several reasons:

    1. We need to complete a round trip email to verify the user.
    2. With a consumer account, the consumer can come back to the site and add new titles to their mail preference choices and monitor the status of their previous requests. This is why we “retain” the names - it is all in the name of providing excellent customer service.
    3. By storing the names, we can provide the merchant’s portion of the Member list at any time, in machine readable form so that it seamlessly integrates into the merge-purge process. We only give the names to the merchants that have opted out of their titles. Without storing the names, we could not provide the service to the merchants.
    4. By storing the names, we can transmit them to merchants in a secure manner.

    Our privacy policy is that we do not release the names to any organization that the member has not set a mail preference for.

    What Donn and the DMA wanted was for us to stop having consumers register at our site and simply provide a link to their site. As you can read throughout this blog, consumers don’t want this approach.

    I hope this answers your question about the name issue. Feel free to contact me at chuck (at) catalogchoice.org if you would like to discuss this further.

    Chuck

    Chuck on July 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

  6. I don’t mind that I received an email in response to my posting, but i never opted-in to receive emails from catalogchoice.

    bill on July 16th, 2008 at 10:31 am

  7. To the folks at CC, anent the “comments” from Bill (with apologies to John Donne): “Ask not for whom the Bill trolls; he trolls for thee.”

    Jim on July 17th, 2008 at 4:07 am
 

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