Thursday, December 10, 2009

So many violations in one paragraph!

I have removed the names to protect the guilty but there are two major legal and ethical problems in this paragraph that I received from a big-name educational website!

BLANK.com December 2009/January2010 Educational Newsletter

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all you participants! BLANK.com has NO FEES. This site offers 2500 pages of interactive word puzzle activities that focus on learning Latin/Greek roots. XXXX and YYYY appreciate your sharing information about its content with colleagues and friends. YYYY[at]BLANK.com will send copies of the newsletter directly to them if you provide their email address. Participants may also use the Monthly Newsletter button (green box on the left side of the home page) to sign up. Thanks for clicking on ads as your efforts help defray some of the expenses of this voluntary effort.-----------------------------

Did you catch them?
1. A CAN-SPAM violation in which they solicity third party names and say that they will email them!
2. Asking people to click on ads. If anyone at Google gets wind of that, you forfeit your adsense account and lose your position in their search engine.
A third possible problem is that they say that the site is run by volunteers. My estimate is that the couple running it pull in a nice six figure income.

Should I tell them?