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Shell, in a seemingly innocent effort to give away a
free phone card valued at $2 to students away from
home during the Chinese New Year, has, according to
Tian, distributed promotional pieces around the
Arizona State University campus. In order to redeem
the offer, students must fill out a web form
including email address, name, address and some
other optional demographic information. Certainly,
this information is needed to send the actual card,
however, the promotions Terms and Conditions state
the cards are only available first come first serve
causing one to wonder why Shell needs to collect the
information from any person who signs up after the
cards run out. Surely, Shell knows exactly how many
cards it has to give out and could very easily
terminate the promotion once all cards have been
claimed rather than continue to collect information
up to an arbitrary end date thereby building itself
a nice fat database of names for future use.Of
course, the sign up form contains check boxes to
control whether or not the person wants Shell to
contact them in the future but even if these boxes
are left unchecked one has to wonder where that
persons contact information ends up. Oops...it just
mistakenly ended up in Shells direct marketing
department.
Its inconceivable to imagine Shell would not
know how many cards it has to give out in the first
place and that they would not be able to track this
down to the exact, last applicant, at which time,
they could close the promotion thus ending the
needless collection of names it knows it cant send
the card to. Are we over analyzing this or are
companies just coming up with ever sneakier means to
collect our contact info?
** Check out our Domestic Phone Card **
Source: http://www.adrants.com/2006/02/shellcollectsconsumerinfowithcalling.php
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