One of the things mentioned in the r/AskReddit thread concerns receiving unsolicited emails. And it's a great example showing us how the lines between privacy and vulnerability to marketing have become blurred in recent years.
Look, we’ve probably all been there: you start getting emails from random people, clogging up your inbox with paragraphs about weird products, news that you never wanted to get, and offers that simply don’t interest you. The fact of the matter is that your email can end up on some ad or PR agency’s list without you having come into contact with them at all in the past. It happens far more often if you’re even a semi-public person and your contact info is visible somewhere on a company website or on social media.
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We’d all probably love it if we were expressly asked if we’d like to subscribe to email lists from a company before they start sending us their newsletters like a bolt from the blue. And sometimes, the ‘unsubscribe’ function (which might take up to several steps) isn’t enough to get them off your back. They keep contacting you. Over. And over. And over again. In short, unsolicited mass marketing is annoying, and unsolicited bulk emails are the devil.
In the United States, for example, it’s perfectly legal to send out unsolicited commercial emails. There are some restrictions, however. Meanwhile, anti-spam laws appear to be stricter in the United Kingdom, and breaches of regulations can lead to fines of up to 500k pounds (around 568k dollars).
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It all comes down to the need for stricter privacy and information-sharing laws. It feels like a huge invasion of privacy when someone you don’t know starts offering services you don’t need. We see enough ads on billboards and on the TV, thank you very much.
Don’t get us wrong, the people sending those marketing emails are just doing their jobs and we’re sure most of them are perfectly decent folks. But boundaries have to be drawn. When you get an email, you expect it to be important, informative, or entertaining. What you don’t want is to have your time and energy wasted by a poorly-disguised ad.
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