Letters

These are example letters, or emails, written to companies to express concern or delight over how they manage the data of their customers. Responses are included. There is also a section showing exchanges with companies to inquire about their practices.

You are a powerful person, if you let yourself be. Your words matter, if you make them visible. Companies are blind stumbling in the darkness of seclusion. A company can't see body language. A company doesn't party with it's customers and get conversation feedback about being cool, or being a jerk. They struggle to understand their place in society like the rest of us. They, like us are forever struggling with their identity. Just reflect for a moment on all the "how are we doing?" survey's you come across, even in a single day. Companie's are looking for our feedback.

Companies on the Internet can be surprisingly small, 20-30 employees or less. Even with larger businesses, the people who influence how the company interacts with you could be relatively small. The defacto fallback to judge how they are doing is to look at sales. Sales are the votes of approval for what they are doing. Everyone that looks and walks away is a disapproval. Writing the company is a much more powerful means of communicating that fills in the gaps.

You might be surprised at how effective a well written letter can be, I know I was. A respectful exchange can make a difference. A company will respond only to those who speak to it, and too often all they hear is the sound of sales. They will take sales of their products as an approval of their work without knowing that the sale was made in spite of their practices. If a minority of the population buys their products by embracing their practices of pushing everyone into the centralized social repositories, the bulk of their customers buy - begrudging these practices, and many more avoid them because the social network is more blatant on their site than their brand, all they will hear are the sounds of combined sales, begrudged or not, unless we speak our mind.

Take 15 minutes and send a short note. Tell the companies you like how they minimize the distractions on the site. Let them know you really don't want to share with the world you just bought hemorrhoid cream or hot chocolate, or anything else and you don't care to see the option with everythng you buy. Tell them you think whether you see the "share this," or "like this," or "tweet this" or "picture this" distractions on their site or not at all should be a "opt-in" setting in your profile. Or most important of all, send a note asking for information regarding just what exactly they are doing with the data they have about you.