How Serious is AGLOCO about SPAM?
Posted by Stephen on
December 5, 2006
If you were worried about SPAM as a results of signing up for AGLOCO, I have a great story for you…
AGLOCO has a very strict ANTI-SPAM policy, however, when I forwarded this SPAMMER’s email to the abuse/spam department at AGLOCO, I was really only expecting to get some canned response that my abuse complaint would be looked after. I even CC’d the guy letting him know what he violated, and why I was turning his ass in for being an idiot SPAMMER.
I got a reply a few hours later from someone I did not expect to take on this complaint. Ray Everett-Church, AGLOCO’s Chief Privacy Officer was on the job, and he was serious about this incident. As serious as their SPAM policy which states:
AGLOCO™’s anti-spam policy, acceptance of which is a condition of our General Membership Agreement, is very simple: if you spam, you are out. Your account will be closed, your referrals will be lost, any benefits due to you will forfeited, and you will be ineligible for a new account. Furthermore, any member who would benefit from your membership will lose the benefit of your referrals. Similarly, if anyone you refer violates this policy, you will lose the potential benefit of having the spammer as a referral as well as the potential benefit of having the spammer’s direct and extended referrals as referrals.
If you’re not familiar with who Mr. Everett-Church is, he is literally the “Daddy of Internet Privacy”. He was the very first Chief Privacy Officer and consults with huge corporations on their privacy policies. You can read more about him here.
To have the CPO of a corporation personally handle a SPAM attack is representative of how truly serious a company is about their ANTI-SPAM policies. With Mr. Everett-Church onboard, you can be pretty sure that AGLOCO is serious about protecting their members and their privacy. Even though it is clear AGLOCO will do what they can to ensure your privacy, you need to also take matters into your own hands as well. If you are not capable of protecting yourself, and if for some reason AGLOCO is not able to maintain your privacy somewhere down the road, you only have yourself to blame.
Mr. Everett-Church was very professional and collected the information he needed from me to do his investigation. The guy I reported emails me back and started back-pedalling, saying that he knew me from Linked-in or something, CC’ing the abuse department in hopes they wouldn’t cancel his account. A little later, he sends me an invitation to join Linked-In, to try to cover his ass. Too little too late buddy. Not only have you screwed yourself over by being an idiot SPAMMER, but you screwed everyone else in your network over. The severity of the AGLOCO SPAM policy is what they hope will keep members inline.
So is AGLOCO serious about SPAM? I would say very serious. Serious enough to have their Chief Privacy Officer personally take care of my complaint. If you were worried about members being idiots and SPAMMING eachother, it looks like it ain’t going to happen. So go ahead, and sign up, but remember that you’re responsible for your own privacy as well.
Perhaps they should try a more subtle form of spamming by posting continuous stories about how great and efficient the program is in blog posts whilst ensuring they slipped links with their referral ID along with the positive blurb
Agloco agloco agloco agloco agloco agloco spam spam spam spam spam spam yawn…
With all due respect…write about food again, darn it…you were good at that! And it was interesting to people who aren’t interested in being motoclones.
Hopefully you both have figured out from my previous AGLOCO posts, I’m in the program…while biting the teet that feeds me. I get into scraps with other AGLOCO members because they aren’t telling people all the risks involved. They say I slow down their ability to sign up people because they keep pointing out what I’ve pointed out: it has some inherent risks. I say good, because I want people to think for themselves for a change.
Moto bitches at me at least once a day for not being absolutely positive about the program. I’m a bad listener
I also reported a blantant email spammer. and they were very serious on getting all header information and everything they could to find out information, and it was a personal very wanting to know who the #$#@ is spamming AGLOCO. I mean I’ve messaged some friends, but not spamed out to thousands of email addresses.