The subscription to the Community Edition of Zoominfo requires subscribers to provide unfettered access to their email address book.
Zoominfo then takes any "business-related" contact information from the subscriber's address book and uses it to increase the "size and quality" of its online database. This is all stated in Zoominfo's "Privacy Policy" in which Zoominfo states that the policy "has been awarded TRUSTe's Privacy Seal signifying that the privacy policy and practices have been reviewed by TRUSTe for compliance with TRUSTe's program requirements including transparency, accountability and choice regarding the collection and use of your personal information." When one clicks on the Truste link, one gets the following message: "This site is NOT CERTIFIED by TRUSTe." Zoominfo provides subscribers with no choice other than to allow Zoominfo Community Edition subscribers to provide unfettered access to their contacts database. Only the "uninformed victims" of this exercise, ie the user's contacts, have the option to opt out but not until it is too late unless Zoominfo proposes sending an email to each of them to inform them that unless they take some action they will be added to Zoominfo's database. As is usually the case with dodgy terms of use, it would be VERY easy for the service provider to make very plain, upfront in the sign on section of the website the most offensive terms, eg "By signing up to the Community Edition of Zoominfo you agree to allow Zoominfo to mine your email address book for the information of your friends and associates and anyone else in your address book and store that information in our database for retrieval and display in our Zoominfo directory." The warning could be a lot more succinctly if preceded by the words "Caution". -- tosdr.org | twitter.com/tosdr | github.com/tosdr --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Terms of Service; Didn't Read" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tosdr. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
