Imitation is the greatest form of flattery?

When one strives for two years to launch a site like itsmypost.com so that consumers can genuinely communicate their preferences to the UK’s leading brands, it’s somewhat galling to have someone else jump on the bandwagon.

Imagine my surprise the other night whilst Googling (I was home alone and it was raining, right!), to find a copycat service being promoted on Sky TV. Imitation might be the greatest form of flattery, but this was pretty lame (the rival service, that is, not Sky - although the latter certainly has its moments). It is just the sort of thing that brings the integrity and credibility of our industry into question by hooking punters with the promise of stopping direct mail whilst in reality creating positive data to be sold to all and sundry.

We have seen this sort of thing before in the guise of the Postal Preference Service – which thankfully never got to deliver ‘don’t want’ data to market before its (unlamented) demise.
The site purports to safeguard consumer data and ‘takes every reasonable precaution to safeguard the personal information you supply to it.’ Call it data intuition or a sixth sense, but imagine my surprise to find that the site’s Data Controller Registration with the ICO has lapsed!
‘Oh boy,’ me thought. ‘This goes from bad to worse.’

At a time when the DM industry is grappling with the implications of the Walport Report and trying to be more secure and transparent in our use of personal information, this site is unnecessarily muddying the waters. Hence if you’re shopping around for a junk mail control service, take my advice and remember two little Latin words when it comes to myletterbox.com: Caveat Emptor.

To appear on afternoon television professing to be an ‘online privacy expert’ only to be shown not to have even the most fundamental understanding of what one needs to do to be compliant beggars belief, in my opinion. It’s a shame that Information Commissioner Richard Thomas was not given the power to jail people earlier this year. By all means play fast and loose with you own reputation, myletterbox.com folk, but to do so with the DM industry’s should be a criminal offence, I reckon.