Rogers email users in Canada are being subjected to a full court press aimed at getting them to hand over email addresses and other personal information of their friends and neighbours so that they can be inundated with yet more advertising.
Rogers has for years outsourced its email service to Yahoo, which after a series of take-overs and mergers is now part of a Verizon/AOL media brand called Oath. In an unprecedented move (and a badly-timed one, given all the concern at the moment about unappropriate uses of online data), Rogers/Oath is requiring its customer base to agree to a new 27-page Terms of Service document which assumes that they have "obtained the consent of your friends and contacts to provide their personal information (for example: their email address or telephone number) to Oath or a third party", so that they can "send messages on your behalf to make the services available to your friends and contacts". So, broadly speaking, Rogers is saying that, if you want to continue as a Rogers customer, you need to hand over all your friends' contact information, so that they (or "third parties") can advertise their wares to them.
Another contentious clause in the new ToS allows Oath to "analyze" users' emails, photos and attachments with a view to delivering, personalizing and developing "relevant features, content, advertising and services". Technically, users could opt out of this tracking-for-advertising-purposes, except that there does not seem to be any obvious way to do this.
Unsurprisingly, many people are up in arms about all of this - there are certainly a good many oaths being bandied around online right now - and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has promised to look into it. An Oath spokesperson, in typical corporate Doublespeak, maintains that it is all meant to increase transparency and user control. Another way of looking at it, though, is that Rogers, and Oath, have its customers' balls in a vice.
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