It’s simple really, we all have to buy things. We REALLY have to buy things for our pets! And we want discounts!!! So, we sign up for websites and mailing lists and swipe cards at stores. And it’s all “free” except it isn’t free at all.
They give us those things for good reasons; because one way or another, they’re making a profit off us signing up. It could be as simple as collecting the information on our purchases for internal marketing and promotion, to help them select what new products to offer us. But these days, it’s so much more of an intricate spider web…
A couple of decades back, there was a huge stink involving print catalogs and mailing lists. We’d sign up for catalogs and suddenly be getting dozens of catalogs and that number grew exponentially. I can remember a point when my mailbox was stuffed with catalogs each and every day! We screamed bloody murder. How dare they be giving out our information? The indignation grew when it was disclosed that they got PAID for that information. I just plain laughed. Of course they sold that information! We certainly didn’t tell them they couldn’t. They didn’t say they wouldn’t. And we were drooling for those discounts which had to be paid for as well as the printing and mailing costs of those catalogs. Of course there had to be a hitch in that deal!
After that stink, there would be check boxes on our sign up forms asking us if they could “share” and statements about “privacy”. Those little statements and boxes have evolved because they still want to sell our information so they phrase in ways to get around any exclusions we want. It’s a game. And now we have shopping on the internet where the stakes are escalated.
Virtually every bit of software we download or install says “click here to agree” and we all know what happens if we don’t. No goodies for us! That has us well trained to agree to just about anything rather than refuse and risk being denied the goodies or merely having to modify what we get. We mostly have a “yeah, yeah, sure, whatever, just give me what I want” attitude but we’re getting (or losing) so much more than we realize.
Some websites have anonymous shopping but we sign up anyway. The boxes and agreements to allow them to sell our info are right there and we ignore them. We want those discounts and sales promos dropped right in our email boxes! We’ll even cough up email and other info on friends to get our grubby paws on some more “free” stuff!
Then some marketing company collects and even aggregates (meaning they collect from different sources and combine the info found on us) that information.
We trust those we’re giving our information to to use good judgment on who they share it with. Why? WHY? These are businesses and they are interested in making a profit. We rarely know who they sell our information to and we don’t generally care enough to object. So why should they care?
A couple of days ago, it was Hill’s Science Diet. Before that it was Mary Kay, except it turned out to be one of the stock holders of Mary Kay. If my money is going to Mary Kay to go to a stockholder who will give it to HSUS, well, I’m just not going to give my money to Mary Kay; cut that chain off at the start!
Today’s stink is about Dr. Foster and Smith selling some customer contact info to HSUS. You’ll find that I have removed my link to Dr. Foster and Smith’s website from my link page. When I find out, I object enough to vote with my dollars and I will shop elsewhere until they get their act together.
I'm not saying these companies bear no responsibility and they know that we may throw fits if we don't like what they do. But, in all honesty, I can’t hold them alone responsible. We have no way of knowing how many companies HSUS, PETA, and the others buy info from. We freely give out our information without any serious restrictions.
If we want these companies to get the message, we need to delete our accounts, remove ourselves from their mailing lists, let them know they can’t have our information unless they put up privacy policies that are real and specific; including who, with specificity, they will sell our information to or that it will not be sold or given away at all. Nearly all of us have been aiding and abetting HSUS, PETA and all the others for years by giving up our information freely or at least cheaply, for the price of discounts and a few coupons we may not even use. We really should go further in demanding to know who those we do business with are giving donations or other support to; who the owners of these companies give donations or other support to.
Whether it’s shopping or laws, it is always going to come back to We the People. We want to push the responsibility off to others but that never works. Others are responsible for what they do but WE simply have to start paying attention and doing our part! (And, frankly, while we're on a close topic, if you have money in Wall Street, you should be expecting yet more losses because we've done nothing to fix that problem either!)
Most of us are aiding and abetting HSUS, PETA, and all the other animal rights activists without even knowing it and we've been at it for decades!