Online petitions - are they genuine? Or phishing trips?

[Sgeir]

I don't wish to be alarmist, but this Forum's had previous scams and phishing trips. We should be careful about passing on personal details to unknown people/organisations.

There is currently another thread seeking personal details - home address and e-mail address - for the sponsor of the petition, a "Chris Jones, a disappointed viewer".

I have read the privacy statement: "The information you provide when you sign a petition is stored on our servers but is the exclusive property of the petition host, who is a member of iPetitions and who has agreed to the terms of this privacy policy. As with the information you supply iPetitions, hosts will be asked not to sell, share, or rent this information with any other company or individual except in an aggregated form. There is one exception to this rule, however, and that is when the petition is presented to its designated recipient. At such time, the recipient will receive a disaggregated list of names with some or all of the information they provided when they signed the petition."

This may be a genuine petition, but I am not terribly impressed with the privacy statement. The petition states that it will be sent to "BBC and also to members of parliament", but it is not clear if they are the designated recipients, or whether such information is held by the sponsor, Mr Jones (who appears to be the "petition host" with exclusive property rights).

I am not accusing Forum mailers or the petition organsiser of phishing - but I would certainly appreciate a bit more info. Hope someone can help.

 

[l'escargot]

ipetitions have a website here. I don't know anything about them, but have a read - not much info available though about "Angle Three Associates" who run the site.

 

[pvb]

Phishing trips....

Definitely...

 

[l'escargot]

Re: Phishing trips....

At worst I would say e mail addresses could be harvested for spamming but it wouldn't fall in the category of "phishing" in the strictest sense of the word.

In a phishing attack, a fraudster spams the Internet with email claiming to be from a reputable financial institution or e-commerce site. The email message urges the recipient to click on a link to update their personal profile or carry out some transaction. The link takes the victim to a fake website designed to look like the real thing. However, any personal or financial information entered is routed directly to the scammer.

 

[BrendanS]

I voted on it when the post first went up. It seems quite safe as it's appears to be (with a little researching) a legitimate petition site.

Any petition site is going to have to ask for information about you, as no organisation or govt is going to accept petitions from anonymous users, otherwise I or you could just go there and sign a few thousand times each. Whether they will pay anymore attention to a properly conducted petition is another discussion.

 

[RupertW]

Perhaps because I used to work for an email marketing site, I'm always wary about giving away my email address to anything automated. We did surveys, petitions, free email, competitions, valentine's day messages and anything else we could think of to get hold of people's addresses. Good intentions proved to be a massively faster way than greed of getting people to pass everything on to all their friends

No particular harm was done, except for adding them to our marketing (spam) lists. Fortunately our sales people were pretty awful at their job so we hardly ever got any spam to send to the 2million plus UK active email addresses which we quickly and legitimately acquired.

The best people at the game run e-cards type sites which manage to get all your well meaning friends to send you those nice colourful cards and thus give your address to the spammers.

I don't know about iPetitions but there is no such thing as a free service, so the question is, how do they make their money, if not by gathering addresses?