Scam alert: [Fwd: Thank you from One Laptop per Child]

[Ixo X oxI]

FYI,
 Sine this topic has nothing to do with OLPC software development, let
me attempt to move this conversion from the "developers" list to the
'support gang' list.

The topic is more appropriate located there (here?). :)

Thanks, -Ixo


On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 16:44, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
>> >> this mail was/is legitimate, and is part of the G1G1 launch
>> >> starting tomorrow.  the links go through a redirector so that
>> >> OLPC can see statistics on click-through responses.
>>
>> I'm sorry, if I get an e-mail with visible links to
>> amazon.com/xo and the hidden version not coming from
>> the amazon.com domain I will delete first and ask
>> questions later.
>
> OLPC should NEVER be tricking its donors with email spy techniques!
>
> I've gone one step further than deleting the messages.  I've stopped
> funding nonprofits who use this kind of surreptitious monitoring in
> their bulk mailings.  You'd be surprised how many nonprofits have been
> snowed by bulk email providers like Convio into perverting the
> recipient's classic postal-mail / email assumptions.  Commercial
> companies are so afraid of being tarred with the spammer brush that
> they don't do this -- but nonprofits aren't yet that smart.  They
> violate donor expecations like like:
>
>  *  Once you sent it, you don't know when, where, or whether I read it
>     (unless it comes as a "registered letter" with explicit tracking).
>  *  I can read it over and over again without you finding out
>  *  I can copy and forward it to others and you can't tell who forwarded it.
>
> These social expectations are being deliberately and silently broken
> by including "web bugs", "tracking links" and similar monitoring
> devices into ordinary emails.  I encourage everybody who receives
> such mails to delete them unread, to chastize the organization
> that sent them (if they can be found), and to stop funding or
> supporting any org that persists.
>
> If an email sender wants to track the popularity of its emails that
> include links, that's easy to do by looking at how many accesses are
> made to the web pages that it links to.  You can even link to a
> landing page for each such email that you send (to 1000 or 100,000
> people), rather than linking to a pre-existing page.  That kind of
> monitoring doesn't intrude on personal privacy by trying to figure out
> WHICH email recipient clicked on the link -- it just counts how many
> did.
>
> You can turn off all these intrusive technologies in the Convio user
> interface -- but they default to "on", because Convio and its sister
> companies care more about data-mining than they do about donor privacy
> or social cohesion.  And they'll continue to do so until donors
> ostracize any nonprofit who does this.
>
>        John Gilmore


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>
Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 16:29
Subject: Re: Scam alert: [Fwd: Thank you from One Laptop per Child]
To: Chris Marshall <jns-cmarshall at comcast.net>
Cc: "devel at lists.laptop.org" <devel at lists.laptop.org>

> I got an email that claimed to be from negroponte at laptop.org asking
> for help with G1G1 but all the links were not to where they said they
> were from. I think it may be phishing or a scam of some sort.  For
> example, the link to amazon.com/XO actually goes to:

If you look at the Received headers you will probably find that it came from
something like ccm01.constantcontact.com

Constant Contact is one of the big ESPs (Email Service Providers).  They
handle mailing lists for other people and generally do a better job than most
people would do by themselves.


> http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?...

If you poke around with whois, you will see that rs6.net is owned by Constant
Contact.

That particular URL will bounce through their system and off to Amazon.  The
idea is that they count clicks.  Marketers love that sort of data so
companies like CC provide it.

A variation is 1x1 gifs, often called web bugs.  That lets them count how
many people opened the mail even if they don't click on any of the links.
That assumes you enable html in your mail reader and that you enable gifs and
...

I'm not sure why they use rs6 (or similar) rather than constantcontact.  I
think I saw an explanation once, but I don't have enough marketing blood in
me for it to make sense.

I'm a privacy nut.  I hate tracking.  I consider it to be rude at best.

I don't know if CC is setup to disable tracking if their customers ask about
it.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:  <pgf at laptop.org>
Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 16:57

john wrote:
 > If an email sender wants to track the popularity of its emails that
 > include links, that's easy to do by looking at how many accesses are
 > made to the web pages that it links to.  You can even link to a
 > landing page for each such email that you send (to 1000 or 100,000
 > people), rather than linking to a pre-existing page.  That kind of
 > monitoring doesn't intrude on personal privacy by trying to figure out
 > WHICH email recipient clicked on the link -- it just counts how many
 > did.

john -- i/we hear you loud and clear.  i will say that OLPC has
no idea _who_ clicked on any given link, nor how many times.  nor
are we the least bit interested in knowing.  as you surmised, the
default setting for doing link redirects is "on", and for better
or worse, they were left that way when we sent the mail.

we will clearly reconsider this setting in the future.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
 give one laptop, get one laptop --- http://www.amazon.com/xo
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