On 12/16/21 7:59 AM, Al Iverson via mailop wrote:
Well, I'm sure this'll be a popular opinion, but I'm giving it anyway. Maybe let's try not to do something that'll screw up that college kid's life forever over their bit of stupidity. It's wrong, they shouldn't be doing it, but it's not for commercial gain, and the amount of bad mail being sent here in comparison to the amount of bad mail being sent by others is .000000001%. If I had a top ten list of spam problems I cared about, this would be #14, barely.
While I know what you mean, I think the reason people are up in arms about it is that it's not solely a spam problem.
This researcher is impersonating a customer of our various services, then asking questions about how we all handle legally required disclosures for that customer. If it were a real customer and we sent the wrong answer, that has legal and financial implications. It can't just be deleted like most spam.
When my staff originally received it, they didn't know how to handle it. Although they knew we take legal requirements seriously, they couldn't find any records related to the supposed person asking the question, so I then spent 30 minutes trying to locate "Anna Roland, [...] a resident of San Francisco, California" in our records, composing a helpful reply, and so on. This is a very poor use of my time, and the upshot is that the researcher tricked me into spending time participating in their study.
Imagine if I impersonated an ethics committee member and sent messages to these professors, asking how they handle complaints, in a way that required an answer so as to not jeopardize their jobs. I doubt they'd be happy when they discovered the impersonation.
-- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies, http://www.tigertech.net/ _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
