FC: Cyveillance replies to Politech over Spamcop, users' privacy

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech message:

"Is Spamcop selling its soul (and users' privacy) to top bidder?"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04842.html

---

From: pwitting () Cyveillance com
To: bill () ries-knight net, declan () well com
Subject: RE: Is Spamcop selling its soul (and users' privacy) to top bidder?
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 14:06:06 -0400

Declan, Bill;

Sorry for the delay. What follows is the official response from our VP of
Client Services. Feel free to follow up to me with any additional issues:

In the interest of a full disclosure and greater understanding of the truth,
I wanted to take the time to respond again to the communications and email
that followed discussion on postings in the past week.  I regret that with
such a variety and volume of questions posed, I am unable to individually
address each one; but I do want to talk more about what Cyveillance is all
about and its intent.

>From the tone of the majority of communications, it appears some readers may
not fully appreciate that our mission is one of partnership with the SpamCop
community; we are FIGHTING the proliferation of spam and the associated
fraud, intellectual property theft, damaged reputations by rumor, scams,
association of respected brands with pornography, credit card theft,
identity theft and more.

----- Cyveillance does NOT mine email addresses from websites as has been
discussed in postings.  We do NOT resell email addresses from spam.  -----

Cyveillance's clients are corporations whose brand names and products are
used in spam without their knowledge.  Cyveillance collects spam content in
order to report abuses to victimized companies so they can take action
against spammers and protect customers.  Any email shared with Cyveillance
will help raise awareness of this pressing consumer protection issue and
harness corporate resources to combat abuse.

Some issues have been raised with regards to our Prospect Locator solution
that generates leads from the Internet.  This is NOT referring to stripping
emails out of sites for spamming, but rather identifying businesses for our
clients who are prospects based on specific attributes of their site.  As an
example to illustrate the point, a client may be in search of sites, say,
that are credit card enabled and demonstrate content making that business
suitable as a partnership.  Such sites are identified and delivered to
clients in low volume (ie, less than 50), who then follow up by phone for
further business development.

We are very careful not to inadvertently use our technology in any way that
could contribute the same activities that we are fighting to deter.
Supporting this position is our active participation in pro-privacy councils
and our selection as the exclusive content monitor for the new "kids.us"
domain to be launched later this year.

Thank you for the feedback and for your joint efforts to help us in our
common goal of combating fraud and abuse on the Internet.

Brian Murray
VP, Client Services
Cyveillance

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Steelhead [mailto:bill () ries-knight net]
>Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 10:55 AM
>To: pwitting () cyveillance com
>Cc: steelhead; declan () well com
>Subject: Fw: Is Spamcop selling its soul (and users' privacy) to top
bidder?
>
>Declan, I'm requesting a comment from Cyveillance on this matter.  I spoke
>to Paul Witting, IT manager there, and he promises to have a response out
>as
>soon as possible.
>
>Bill Ries-Knight
>Stockton, CA 




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