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Remember when your email address, when given to a campaign or non-profit, was considered private? Even groups that engage in list swaps with their snail mail lists wouldn’t think of doing the same with their email - the most they might consider is sending an appeal pitching a colleague or ally, but the list remains firmly in their hands.

Unfortunately, one political campaign has gone a step worse than a swap: they’ve put your email address up for grabs by the repo man. According to an article in the politico:

When John McCain’s presidential campaign all but went broke, it borrowed money from its bank using its fundraising list as collateral.

Problem: McCain’s own privacy policy promises donors he won’t sell their information.

That seems to put the Republican senator’s campaign in a pickle; either it pledged to its bank proceeds from something it can’t sell, or it offered to violate its own promise to donors.[h/t: Daily Kos]

The McCain privacy policy is pretty clear here, and it’s not too different from what most organizations have:

We will not sell your personal information. John McCain 2008, will not sell your information to third parties or any commercial entities.

Will this make McCain an accessory to spam? I discuss what value these addresses could have, and why this kind of practice is extremely dangerous, below the fold…

So the question here becomes what value those email addresses have, that McCain could use them as collateral. They’re certainly more valuable to him than they would be to anyone else - in theory, everyone on the list should be at least marginally interested in McCain’s candidacy.

But they have value to others as well. The lowest common denominator would be for the bank to sell them a mass mailing service, like those sleazy offers for CDs full of email addresses you see advertised every so often. Similarly, the names could be directly marketed by the bank. While they were never given opt-in permission, that may not stop them - many commercial entities aren’t as strict about permissions as NPOs.

Of course, another option would be to make use of the names in a way that wasn’t spam, but also had value. For example, the bank could sell the list to a harvesting organization that would use them for appends. Or to a credit bureau to update their records with information that would likely not be given freely. Or to a variety of other semi-nefarious organizations.

The main point, though, isn’t so much where the emails could go as it is the gigantic breach of trust with a campaign’s list. Part of giving your email to any political campaign is an understanding that they may go down, particularly in a primary environment. And when they do fall apart, it’s assumed that they won’t be trading in your private and personal information for one last attack ad in Michigan or fill up of the "Straight Talk" Express. This sort of practice is unethical, and even if it is legal (which it shouldn’t be), organizations should be clear that they would never mortgage your email address.

It only takes a few bad seeds using this practice to make people less likely to give out their email addresses to deserving groups. Hopefully the McCain campaign will come to their senses and back out before they ruin email marketing for the folks who follow their own rules. For someone who claims to be so opposed to pork, McCain doesn’t seem to have a problem with spam.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Business Strategy and Process, Current Affairs, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.