GDPR keeps you safe.
You may have heard of the GDPR right? The European regulation’s on protecting your privacy and not use (or abuse) your data without your consent. You may also know that if an entity wants to send you commercial email, they have to provide an opt-in for this, basically meaning that you have to tick that box that you are aware that your data may be used by an entity like a government, business, etc. for certain purposes you also agree on.
Don’t like GDPR as an ad company? You use shady tactics…
So every company, even an European based ad company, has to obey to these GDPR rules. But what do you do as an ad company if no potential consumer is voluntarily and deliberately signing up for your ad lead database?
Then you walk the shady path, on the edge of GDPR, to still get consumers for your ad company, and sell consumer data to their customers, for leads generation and spamming consumers without their consent/approval. This is how I found out.
Campaign site ‘collected’ your data from yourself?
I’m since long (maybe four years or longer) a customer of a certain website that offers daily mail with products. I sometimes buy stuff from them. I have deliberately signed up to this website from this company to get their daily email and buy things ocassionaly.
But all of a sudden, on a completely other mail address I signed up for, I get a lot of spam, from zero spam to two or three a day. On this email address, which I never got spam before, because it’s not a publicly known email address, I also never subscribe to any service on the internet. So that was really odd. And after a while, I also got an email from the daily offers website, stating I had given my email address and data via their partner campaign site, and now they want to know if I want to be their customer. Besides this one email, I also got a lot of spam from Blue Media Ads mail adresses (see below from which ones).
So I asked this daily offer website how they got my email address, and who delivered it to them. They pointed to their partner AffilyAds, and also stated they used their (AffilyAds) campaign site https://hnm.nl-freebies.com and have collected my data there. So the daily offer website says that I personally added my email address and other data on this campaign website.
Before I give you more details, this is what AffilyAds states on their website:
All data is properly validated before it’s stored safely and GDPR compliant to our encrypted databases, through which all data can be properly managed, analyzed and distributed to other CRM systems via our enhanced API data distribution technology.
Source: https://affilyads.com/our-technology/
Screenshot:
There is no truth in this, because I was spammed because of AffilyAds, on an email address with which I didn’t sign up for at their campaign site https://hnm.nl-freebies.com, ever! I didn’t even know this site before and never visited it before. Also I never sign up with this email address to any service on the internet. So it should not be known by anyone, so I’m still baffled on how they got this email address.
Shady tactics, but still a Data Privacy Officer…
I asked the daily offer website to give me a contact at AffilyAds to ask where and how they got my data. So I got the email address of the Data Privacy Officer (DPO) at AffilyAds. I asked the DPO about this and also asked to show me the data they had collected on me. I was especially curious about the IP address they maybe collected, as I supposedly entered my data on their campaign site.
After a while I got a response and my personal data was pretty accurate, they even had my correct birth date. But also a lot of data, like my physical home address and phone number, was missing. My first name was wrong though, that’s is my birth first name which I don’t use anymore in public and internet life since the year 2000. The IP Address was filled in, which I didn’t recognize, and looked it up with a WHOIS lookup. It pointed to the city Utrecht in The Netherlands. I also live in The Netherlands, but three provinces to the north of province Utrecht. Also at the timestamp of the supposedly entered data, I was not anywhere near Utrecht. So this is a absolutely bogus and involuntary entry in AffilyAds ‘validated’ and ‘GDPR compliant’ encrypted database. I have not consented to this and not filled in my data at this campaign website.
I’ve confronted AffilyAds with this but they do not confirm or deny my take.
My take on this is that they feeded my data and that of many others from some harvested spam collection, which was not vetted or validated in a GDPR opt-in fashion at all, into their lead generation database, and sold this data to every other company willing to pay for this little ‘goldmine’.
I know others are also bothered with this AffilyAds ‘campaign’ to collect consumer data, by the Google Reviews on AffilyAds. A few of them, screenshotted, but this is probably a tip of the iceberg:
This is probably a tip of the iceberg, because a lot of people don’t even know they got spam because of AffilyAds. But if you get a lot of spam from Blue Media Ads all of a sudden, you can be fairly sure, that AffilyAds is behind it. Because the DPO has stated that Blue Media Ads is their partner and they give/sell data to them.
Blue Media Ads uses email addresses on domains to send their spam from, a few I collected:
- [info][@][adv][.][onmisbaretips][.][nl]
- [nieuws][@][mail][.][blauwnieuwsbrief][.][com]
- [nieuws][@][nieuws][.][blue-promo][.][be]
- [nieuws][@][nieuws][.][vlaanmail][.][com]
- [nieuws][@][mail][.][bigbendeals][.][com]
- [nieuws][@][mail][.][fuchs-news][.][com]
How to get rid of AffilyAds/Blue Media Ads spam
So after I got the info from AffilyAds about my entry in their database, I asked the DPO of AffilyAds to stop spamming me or by their partners immediately, and remove my data from their database, and ask for a confirmation of this. The emailaddress to request this is : [dpo][@][affilyads][.][com], ask for your data, check things and if not correct ask to stop sending spam and remove your data from their database.
I’ve bracketed the email adresses because AffilyAds and Blue Media Ads must know how annoying spam is, so going through some lengths to avoid spam from spam harvesters to these email addresses. :-)