Dell survey privacy breach by MarketTools

 by Martin Belam, 21 December 2006

A couple of weeks back I was invited to take part in a customer satisfaction survey about the Dell laptop that I had purchased to take away travelling with me. Although it has done me a good service, I've never been overly happy with it - probably because I didn't spend enough money on it. Credit where credit is due to Dell though, when I blogged on 'A lemon tree of our own' about breaking the keyboard on it, one of their customer service team pro-actively contacted me about getting it replaced.

Anyway I did the survey, and at the end of it I was asked for a U.S. Zip code to enter a prize draw. Obviously I don't have one, so I skipped that part and thought no more about it. Until yesterday.

Yesterday I got a mail from the company who were running the mechanics of the survey on behalf of Dell, MarketTools. They wanted to apologise to me for erroneously inviting me into a U.S. only prize draw, and wanted to offer me a 5GBP Amazon voucher for having taken part instead.

All fine and lovely, except that the email was openly CC'd to 255 other people who had taken part in the survey.

It does make you wonder how well MarketTools look after the private market data they collect if they are happy to breach my privacy so bluntly when in the process of making an apology.

2 Comments

Presumably, then, this voucher is an unrestricted code... Care to spread the contents a little wider?

The voucher details were not in the email, they are to follow later. Mind you, maybe they'll just send the same code to the 256 people, and whoever scrambles to log on to Amazon first gets it :-)

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