<![CDATA[Rapleaf wants your email address]]>If there’s one reason why I hate corporate marketing departments it’s that they always want your data. Why? To study it. To justify their existence to their bosses.

I saw this pressure up close and personal when the team I was on, Channel 9, was pressured to use Passport and force people to sign up.

Stefanie Olsen at ZDNet News reports on Rapleaf and Upscoop who are collecting email addresses, among other things, from Facebook and other platforms, and reportedly selling them to marketers.

When I worked at a magazine back in the 1990s I saw this up close and personal too. Did you know that magazines trade your shipping address? Often they collect up to $.08 an address, too. There are entire businesses that do nothing but sell these mailing lists and provide more revenues to publishers.

These are just a modern version of those businesses.

Translation: more commercial crap you don’t want is coming to your social network and your email soon.

Sigh.

UPDATE: Judi Sohn says I totally missed the point here and links to responses from Rapleaf to Stefanie’s post.

UPDATE2: I totally got this one wrong. See my comments here for more info.

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