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July 7, 2005
Plaxo and AOL Join Hips
This techdirt article on Plaxo and AOL makes for some interesting reading, especially if you think Plaxo is, whether they want to be or not, a full-bore spam support organization naively pretending to be a responsible "service". I know, we don't have any privacy in the Internet Age, and we should just "get over it"; and yet, I find it irresponsible of Plaxo to continue to exist.
Frankly, I don't trust any company whose business plan relies on free service and the gradual acquisition of massive amounts of personal data, no matter how they plan to extend the basic service with for-pay options, and whose privacy policy (like most privacy policies, unfortunately) may be updated at any time, regardless of how stringent it may be at present.
I've seen too many of these go out of business (surprise!) and too many times seen my privacy violated. I still get spam at the address I used for sixdegrees.com.
I don't want my mom's AOL address book to suddenly become part of the inevitable "transfer of assets" which is followed by the inevitable "update to the privacy policy". And until I see some toothy class action lawsuits or some other stick with which to beat these services out of their stupidity, I'm going to continue to block Plaxo.
It would be curious to see whether someone in the US with a wholly European set of contacts can get Plaxo sued into glowing insolvency for violation of the EU privacy and data handling laws.
Posted by schampeo at July 7, 2005 2:42 PM