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Spitzer Accuses FreeiPods.com Of Privacy Breach
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-03-24
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office believes FreeiPods.com's owner Gratis Internet committed "the largest deliberate breach of privacy in internet history."
A statement from Spitzer's office alleges Gratis sold personal information received from consumers as fast as it could get it, despite numerous reassurances on its website that it would not do so.
Gratis owns FreeiPods.com and several other sites where users could receive free products by agreeing to free trials of other products or services.
Once Spitzer's staff began a general investigation of illegal data-mining last year, they quickly found the Washington, DC-based Gratis a focus of their efforts.
What they found was not pretty, despite Gratis' promises of privacy protection:
… the Attorney General's investigation confirmed that Gratis's owners, Peter Martin and Robert Jewell, repeatedly violated these promises during 2004 and 2005 by selling access to lists of millions of Gratis's customers to three independent email marketers. The marketers then sent hundreds of millions of email solicitations to those users, on behalf of their own customers. In each of these deals, Gratis wrongfully shared between one and seven million confidential user records.
Gratis denied the accusations, going so far as to tell Spitzer in writing that "at all times during its existence . . . Gratis has never sold, rented, or lent email addresses or personal information of its users to any third-party and the company has always maintained control over and ownership of such information."
Investigators subsequently found contracts between Gratis and firms like email marketer Datran Media; they collected evidence and testimony from other marketers that did business with Gratis.
"Unless checked now, companies that collect and sell information on consumers will continue to find ways to erode the basic standards that protect privacy in the internet age," Spitzer said in the statement.
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Tags: Eliot Spitzer, Gratis Internet, FreeiPods.com |
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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