FT Violation of Privacy
 

Today I received Talk Mail at my usual email address. However, for the first time I also received it at my office email. I have NEVER used this address for official FT correspondence and I am angered and astounded that someone decided to trace me, to find my business email address, and to start sending me emails from FT. This MUST stop. It is a violation of my privacy and very scary.

I have contacted the administrator but this is something that the community needs to know. I have never used my office email for FT other than with a few people on Coupon Connection. I have never given my office email to anyone at FT. Now it is not a matter of my employer causing problems. It is an issue of how FT decided to trace my business email and why.

Any email address ingy (Frugal Travel Guy the person, who used to own the Frugal Travel Guy blog) came into contact with he seemed to add to his 'newsletter'. As a result I would receive multiple copies of that newsletter, even though I did not ever subscribe to it (and did not really want it, let alone multiple copies of it).

My guess is that since IB bought that blog, they merged the FTG email list into their FT one very recently. Perhaps your work address was in Ingy's possession?

This is one mechanism by which poor email address collection could have polluted the FT list. It's admittedly just a hypothesis as I cannot speak to your situation directly.

Don't know the FTG, so this is not a likely explanation.

Flyertalk does not generate emails based on a search, or cross-search, of email addresses or any other user information. There are existing lists of email addresses used for newsletters that come from the FT user registration rolls and a handful of partner sites. At some point presumably you registered your other email address on one of those sites. It's the only way we'd have it.

I will ensure that it is removed from the FT newsletter mailing list.