Pathfinder 1E Has Paizo been selling my address?

[Torillan]

And, I believe, illegal considering my demands to the contrary.

And yet, you had stated this earlier:

""All my settings there are unchecked, so if they've been sharing my data, they're doing it illegally, assuming the laws in the U.S. are something like those in Canada."

Just wanted to have you clarify what you meant.

Each party bears some responsibility regarding personal information, but there is only one entity that can control what happens to it:

YOU!!!!!!

 

[Estlor]

You don't see me complaining about the ads inside the magazine, do you? I understand they're a necessary evil. I also don't find them as intrusive and offensive as direct-marketing. But ads should stay quarantined between the covers of the magazine, and preferably in a separate section near the back (like WotC's quarterly ad supplement, which I use to line my birdcages, since it's coincidentally a great size for it, and careful removal of those pages doesn't damage any actually valuable content).

I can dig your disdain of receiving ads in your mailbox, but when he says advertisers allow them to make a profit, he means every stream of advertiser revenue, not just print ads inside the magazine itself. Without getting into the ethics or fuzzy-term "rightness" of the action, your subscriber list - a list of guaranteed addresses that have real people on the other end - is a resource of great value. From a business standpoint, if you don't (or can't) find a way to leverage that resource into quantifiable money you're missing out big time.

Direct mailer ads are a fact of life. A house sells in your neighborhood, the real estate agent sends everyone else a card. The department store has a sale, everybody in their target region gets a card. There are, of course, two schools of thought to it. One is if you blow a whole bunch of cards out the door, some of them will stick and the number that do will more than pay for the money spent in printing/shipping. The other does a mailer, then conducts market research to find out if the mailer worked before sending another. Of course, some people would hate the follow-up call just as much as the mailer. That sort usually can't accept the benefits market research gets them in the long run, they just think about the inconvenience it's causing them now.

 

[nothing to see here]

of course your address is being sold

Subscription lists of all kinds (and in particular magazine subscription lists) are worth a fortune to anybody with an interest in marketing to a pre-targeted audience.

More and more now markters are moving from the old 'carpet bomb' model to a 'laser-precision model" they don't want to waste money sending stuff to people who may or may not be there, or who lie completely outside of the demographics they are trying to reach.

Well, if someone is a Dragon subscriber you already know a fair amount about their likely gender, age, income range, geographic location, family status and recreational interests. All of which is gold if you are trying to sell to one of these targets.

At worst performance this strategy is far cheaper, its targeted, and it's almost guaranteed a response rate much higher than other direct mailouts.

In some cases It also ensures that opinion leaders are penetrated. I'd reckon that the kind of gamer who subscribes to Dragon is far more likely to influence his/her friends' game-related purchases. So if you are in that industry, it makes sense to go after the subscribers.

This is big business and worth big money to the holders of large subscription lists. Even if you specifically check off the "don't share" my address box when you subscribe to something don't be shocked if your address get's shared anyway. Believe me, I've been party to such transactions.

Most respectable companies (such as a Paizo, I would only assume) do take great pains to keep their lists away from the total junk-mail and spam-peddlers, but list selling remains a underpublicized source of revenue for most major periodicals.

The same goes for e-mail lists and now more and more...targeted web based advertising as well. It's worth remembering that when you sign up for something 'free'...the space where you enter your e-mail address is, in fact, worth something. Not much by itself. Nut with 50,000 other (valid) e-mail addresses, worth a lot.

There are lots of elaborate ways you can protect yor address and info from being mined this way. My favorite is quite simple though...Throw the crap out and forget about it. You may not get the 2 seconds of your life back, but it will save you a whole lot of stress compared to fighting the system.

 

[nothing to see here]

If it is Paizo it is only for those customers who have subscriptions. I have been a customer of Paizo's online store for quite some time and have made at least a dozen seperate purchases from them at their store (mini's which cost too much). I have not recieved anything and I am also a Canadian citizen living in Langley BC, a suburb of Vancouver BC.

Canada's privacy laws are, to the best of my recollection, more expansive than the American variety. Though Canadians are not completely protected either.

As Torillan already put so well...the ultimate resposnibilty for protecting your personal information falls on you...should you choose to volunteer that information in the commercial domain...you make your personal information a commodity in the commercial domain.

 

[Henry]

Edit: And I didn't know Boston was in Nigeria? Learn something every day, eh?

I'm almost tempted to edit Piratecat's Location to say "Sleepless in Bosgeria."

 

[WayneLigon]

I think you need to step back for a second before leaping for Paizo's throat.

Have you ever bought anything from Amazon, SF Book Club, RPGNow, or any other even vaguely fantasy-related or game-related product over the net? There's any number of places that could sell your personal info, or just let it escape into the wild. Those lists are pretty valuable info; employees have been known to sell lists themselves, sometimes for several thousand dollars a pop.

If you've ever bought any gaming- or fantasy-books thing with your credit card, you can bet that purchasing info winds up somewhere and it doesn't matter what their privacy policy says: they need a couple million to shore up someone's screw-up elsewhere, and that list'll get sold udner the table. Same with the receipts from any book store purchases; there's a discount card involved that has your address linked to it, somewhere.

You have a PC and an internet connection; somewhere on there is your name and address, and you surf to sites like this one. I wouldn't put it past some bot or spider looking at your search choices and scampering back to report them to it's dark masters, either.

If you haven't gotten any junk mail in a year, you've just been lucky.

 

[diaglo]

i didn't get an ad in my mailbox. i feel unloved.

somebody hug me. pweeze.




i did receive over 100+ post cards from Charles Ryan

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

And yet, you had stated this earlier:

""All my settings there are unchecked, so if they've been sharing my data, they're doing it illegally, assuming the laws in the U.S. are something like those in Canada."

Just wanted to have you clarify what you meant.

Each party bears some responsibility regarding personal information, but there is only one entity that can control what happens to it:

YOU!!!!!!

How does this contradict anything I've stated? My settings are not checked. The only way they're allowed to sell my info is if my settings are checked. Therefore, they're in violation of their own policy, if not actually the law in their jurisdiction.

 

[nothing to see here]

First of all, a D&D chess set is completely unrelated to D&D. It's a chess set. It could be a Magical Trevor chess set or a Teletubbies chess set and it would have about as much to do with D&D as the D&D chess set.

Secondly, I'm quite certain that there are about forty billion products out there that someone wants to sell me that I can get along just fine without. Like cellular phones, or gold credit cards, or pewter wizard figurines. That I don't know about them is an excellent thing. If I have the need for something, I say to myself, "why don't they make this thing I need? Wait, maybe if I Google it..." and if it exists I can locate and purchase it. Like replacement blades for my Rolls Razor. Those are not advertised anywhere that I've ever seen, but I know where to order them from because I'm smart enough to use the intarwebs to find them. Marketers only need to advertise stuff that I don't want to buy, because if I want to buy it, I'll find it. Sending me card stock makes me less likely to buy whatever the hell it is they're trying to sell me, partly because I know that they're so desperate to sell whatever widget they're hawking that they're willing to spend thousands of dollars to mail the cards out. That tells me that they think the product won't move itself otherwise, which means that it's probably crap.

.

There's a term for advertisements that are easily ignored...I believe marketers call it a "waste of money".

I think you have it backwards..."good" ads aren't the ads you easil ignore and line your bird cage with...that's where 'bad' ads go (though even in this case, as I doubt you are the target for the WOTC insert, the adds may still be quite successful).

I think you are putting way too much stock in the public's capacity for independant information seeking... market research shows time and time again that people do not (and do not particularly) want to sit down, create a needs/want assessment and do their own reserch on what they really need. IF they did, you would get your wish and the advertising industry would collapse. OF course, so would our entire economy.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I think you need to step back for a second before leaping for Paizo's throat.

Have you ever bought anything from Amazon, SF Book Club, RPGNow, or any other even vaguely fantasy-related or game-related product over the net?

No. Just Amazon. Privacy policy there, though, and I rarely buy gaming books. Mostly it's DVDs.

If you've ever bought any gaming- or fantasy-books thing with your credit card, you can bet that purchasing info winds up somewhere and it doesn't matter what their privacy policy says: they need a couple million to shore up someone's screw-up elsewhere, and that list'll get sold udner the table. Same with the receipts from any book store purchases; there's a discount card involved that has your address linked to it, somewhere.

That's true. However, I don't sign up for anything that requires my personal info. My credit card company has been told not to share my info, and as I pointed out, the CMA maintains a "do not contact" list which I am a part of. My credit card is also drawn from a Canadian bank, and yet this is an American marketing company, which reduces the chances that they'd be buying Canadian customer lists. There are multiple barriers to contacting me, which has--as I pointed out--reduced my junk mail to zero plus this ad.

You have a PC and an internet connection; somewhere on there is your name and address, and you surf to sites like this one. I wouldn't put it past some bot or spider looking at your search choices and scampering back to report them to it's dark masters, either.

If you haven't gotten any junk mail in a year, you've just been lucky.

No, I've been vigilant. I don't keep any of my personal contact info on my computer. Really, I don't see the need to do so. I'm also fairly paranoid about bots, virii and malware. I use fake addresses when signing up for things, I maintain a couple of spam-soaker email addresses for registering to things that I don't completely trust, and I simply do not share my personal info with anyone who doesn't seriously need to know.

I think it's actually quite telling that you assume that I'm lucky instead of determined. The reason this is a big deal for me is that I had been successful in my endeavours up until WotC broke my streak. Not lucky. Successful. Now, someone has sold my info, and this is probably contrary to their own privacy policy and to my instructions to the contrary. Fortunately, I'll be moving soon, so they can keep sending their junk to my defunct address. In fact, I'm happy that they'll waste their money barking up that tree.