Software
welcome to my space

eBay, the world's most popular auction site, told users that registered between April and November last year that their preferences for e-mails and other communications will be changed; users will now be actively marketed to via e-mail and the telephone unless they change their settings back before 23 January.

The company justifies this by saying that there was a bug in the system. Questions asked during the registration process -- questions like "Do you want to receive calls from telemarketers?" -- were set by default to "no", when they all should have defaulted to "yes". Suddenly realizing that many customers may just have pressed the "continue" button without understanding what they were doing, eBay graciously changed all their preferences so that, unless they go and change their preferences back, roughly 6 million users will begin receiving spam and telemarketing calls.

How very thoughtful. It seems that those dot-coms that have survived are adopting some of the more predatory marketing practices usually associated with the Old Economy, such as Opt-Out marketing and changing policies after acceptance by users.