Tech Central Station: "We don't know how you got on our list, but we don't spam."

Boy, that’s useless.

They say don’t spam. They don’t know how I got on their list. They say “someone must have signed you up”, which is to say, it is possible to get on their list without signing yourself up. They don’t know who, they don’t care; if I want, they can remove me, but they won’t tell me where they got my name, they don’t track this stuff, they don’t care.

That’s exactly what spam is.

There’s probably someone at TCS who harvested my address.
They spam. They continue spamming.

If you want to get off their list, send mail to jpeterson@techcentralstation.com. He can’t actually take you off the list, but he can forward your request to the person who can. The person who actually runs the list is apparently not available for contact.

Mr. Peterson was in a meeting, and too busy to deal with my call. That’s what I like to hear; abuse of personal privacy is a low priority, something you brush off, something you ignore while you’re doing your real work. Ethics are a secondary issue; what’s important is that we Get Stuff Done.

I’ll try to get him to make me stop getting his junk mail. I doubt it’ll work. They don’t care, and they don’t have any reason to care, because spamming doesn’t cost them anything.

If they cared, they would have responded to my previous calls, or my previous email. They didn’t. Not even a “what are you talking about” kind of response. No call, no email, no contact of any sort. Just drop it in the memory hole; it’s just some guy, we don’t know who he is, who thinks he’s too good for our mailing list.

Spammers. They never change. They always think spam is “something other than what we do”. They never look at the straight up facts.

Did I ask for this mail? No.
Did they ask my permission to send it? No.
Do they have my permission to send it? No.
Are they sending it anyway? Yes.
Did they respond to my repeated requests that they explain how I got on their list? No.

Previous comments (and yes, I’ve been trying to get them to do something about this for about three months):

Blogspam (September 17th)
And TechCentralStation is still spamming me. (November 11th)

Edited to add:

I’m not the only person with doubts about them. Nicholas Confessore spotted them a while back:

But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

Update, December 9th: Still spamming.

Comments [archived]

From: seebs_lawyer
Date: 2003-12-06 00:55:50 -0600

In the case of junk faxes, the FCC says if the junk faxer can’t say how they got your permission send their junk, that in and of itself is evidence that they DON’T have your permission to send their junk.

I’m tired. I’ve been working on a lemon law case all day with documents forged and altered by the dealer. It all goes to prove one of my hard learned rules of consumer protection litigation: Liars tell lies; it’s just something that liars do.