Vox

Not Acceptable

One of the benefits of having your own domain(s) is the ability to create countless email addresses. I generally create a new address for each website I sign up for, some of you may have noticed the email address I use in comments on your site is specific to your site.

I do that for business sites as well, so when I went on TicketMaster I created the email address ticketmaster at bkennelly dot com. This is not an address I have (or would have) used anywhere else. And yet I started getting spam to that account - and really, I am happy with the size of my penis, thank you.

            So I went to Ticketmaster to find out why they allowed my email address to get out - and the first response I got was

Thank you for your email. We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced. To change your preferences, please visit:

https://www.ticketmaster.com/member/edit_subscriptions

Near the bottom of the page, there is an option labeled "Receive customer service emails only" in a gray shaded area. Select this option and then click the Submit My Request button. This will ensure that you receive only order-related email from Ticketmaster.

Should you have any further questions, please reply and include all previous correspondence.

I wasn't complaining about the emails I was receiving from them, however, so changing my subscription preferences would be unlikely to solve the problem. I wrote back and told them they didn't even come close to answering my question, to which they replied:

Thank you for your e-mail. We understand and appreciate your concerns. Ticketmaster sells tickets on behalf of third parties such as sports teams, event promoters, stadiums, arenas and theaters. Many of these third parties (i.e., event hosts) require that we provide them with the contact information we collect from the customers who are buying tickets to their events. Please note that when we send customer contact information to event hosts we inform them of the customer's e-mail opt-in or opt-out preferences regarding receiving marketing communications.

At Ticketmaster we believe it is very important to completely and conspicuously disclose how we use the information we collect. We pride ourselves on the fact that we give even more notice than is typical of other web sites: we make our information sharing practices clear throughout our purchase and registration processes by displaying prominent on-screen notices, in addition to in our privacy policy. We do this because we believe it is important for our customers to be able to make informed decisions.

If you are not comfortable with having your information shared with the company that is offering the ticket through Ticketmaster, then we encourage you to either purchase the ticket directly from that company's box office (after first asking them about their information practices) or to purchase the ticket at one of Ticketmaster's several thousand in-store outlets.

Nice try, but I didn't buy any tickets through TicketMaster - I merely signed up for their alerts. There is NO reason for them to have given my information to a third party. That leaves two other options I can think of:

• They sell/give their email list to outside parties when there is no acceptable business reason to do so (i.e. if I had purchased tickets to a third party event)
  
• They have lousy security on their site which allowed someone to crack into their database and harvest their customer emails - which would make me uncomfortable with giving them any credit card information

Either way, I won't be doing business with them now or in the future. And I don't find their 'explanation' acceptable, and I certainly don't believe the tagline they included:

Thank you for using Ticketmaster, and we really appreciate your business.

Luckily, I can kill that email address as easily as I created it. Maybe I should set it to forward to them....

Posted by Vox at November 3, 2005 09:01 PM | peeves