Twitter ‘Spam’
I’ve just received a uniquely personalized email from a marketing company that is trying to sell me a product that increases my blog’s visibility by attracting more readers, and I am outraged!
Why so? It’s just another piece of marketing mail, of which we all of get masses everyday? Then why am I so annoyed?
I have good reason! This email has some very peculiar characteristics. I received this mail at an email address that is not directly available. I don’t use this email address anywhere – other than on my Twitter profile, and in an image format. Personal information, along with my photograph and email address is displayed as a background image there. I had thought it would be a good way to keep my email address safe from automatic readers, while at the same time personalizing my Twitter page. It’s not only me doing this. Thousands of people have their contact details visible as background images on their Twitter pages. Internet gurus recommend this as best practice – namely personalize your Twitter page to create a stronger social presence. That’s what I did, and I’m rewarded with spam email messages!
I always thought that because I don’t have a public profile on Twitter, I was safe from nuisance calls! A state of grace somewhat rare on Twitter. But I was wrong! Marketing companies are somehow even pulling out image-based email addresses. How are they doing this? Optical Character Recognition? Or possibly by employing low-cost human labour to collect live email addresses from the images? Here’s another phenomenon that needs studying by web ecologists.
It’s time to raise the alarm. Marketing companies are using all sorts of tricks to get every piece of information they can get about you, and as soon as they strike lucky you get spammed. Because the email is personally addressed, spam filters let it through straight into my email box!
Add one more type of spam mail to the list – Twitter Spam!
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Eh – spam is spam no matter how it is collected. It’s the concept of wholesale harvesting of data providing economic returns that is the problem. Perhaps I’ll write on it later… I’ve got a bone to pick, but I’m not positive it’s in the nature of this site.