Hi Mike,
You wrote: "I take your point about 'slippery slopes' but I'm still surprised
at the tone of some replies, recommending boycotts and suggesting those of us
that decided to contribute to the project may never see our money again (or the
DVD we expect to have paid for), which is what I was getting at with the 'mean
spirited' reference."
That's fair enough, but obviously many birding-aus users (even those like me
who simply browse the archives, and yet still found ourselves spammed by
Balangara) are particularly aggravated by unsolicited commercial email of any
kind. While the hostility of some responses may appear mean-spirited, the
principle they are defending is clear: many people do regard spam as an
invasion of privacy, regardless of the motives of the sender, and are therefore
resentful - quite understandably, in my view. In an age where millions of
people seem happy to give away their personal information via facebook, etc,
many more are just as vehemently protective of it. We don't know who Balangara
is, we don't know what they intend to do with the email addresses they've
harvested (probably nothing, but that's not the point) and are suspicious and
angry about the intrusion.
Also, birding-aus has long held a policy that messages should not be of a
strictly commercial nature. That's certainly been stretched pretty thin in
recent times (as noted earlier), but the ironic thing is that in this instance
a one-off message communicated via birding-aus generally would have caused a
great deal less angst than individual messages being sent to thousands of
birding-aus subscribers and occasional contributors alike. Of course, Balangara
may not have known that, but I suspect after this furore it's a mistake they
won't make again. :)
Cheers
Andrew
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