Please Don't Send Me a FREE E-Card! - A Prescription Bluegrass Editorial

Companies are globing on to this like it's free gold … and well, maybe for them it is.

Here's the deal:

They will send you a post card in the regular postal mail or to your email if they have the address already. The post card is a beautiful picture of original art and the message says you can send this beautiful E-Card to as many friends as you like – all free.

Now you and I know that nothing that is ever advertised as FREE is truly free or at no cost. It's just that you won't be expected to pay up front. But believe me, you and every one of your “friends” will be paying and paying and paying for quite some time. I had to put friends in quotation marks because after this, they may not be calling you “friend” much longer.

Sure, the card is nice, and it is original, but you know it will come with an advertising message and if it all stopped right there, it might just somehow be a bit worthwhile. But you know it won't stop right there. And it won't ever stop until either you, your friends, or the company dies.

Wow! FREE E-Cards! Beautiful artwork! Won't my friends be impressed? STOP! Already. THINK! What will you have to do to send these FREE E-Cards?

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Here's the way it works, and it doesn't take a lot to figure this out if we'd all just stop and think for a second before jumping on something that sounds too good to be true. First they want to know WHO you'll be sending to. That means they'll get at least one email address and a name to mine from your account, but chances are you'll enter in several … mom, dad, Opie, Aunt Bea, and Cousins Goober and Gomer, and Floyd the Barber, and Sarah at the phone company, and … well, the list just goes on and on. Now look at all the email addresses they've got that they didn't have before.

Now they'll start sending out all sorts of attractive offers for all of these people to become paying customers of whatever product or service they sell. And these friends of yours will be bombarded with advertisements in their email for years to come.

But it doesn't stop there either, and isn't it already bad enough? No, once they hit that 50 thousand number from your list and all the others who bit on the hook, they'll start to farm out those addresses and other associated data to anyone who wants to buy a list. And they'll sell it over and over and over again.

First they'll sell their list (with my name included if you send me that free E-Card) to someone who wants a list of folks in my zip code. Next they'll sell it to someone who want's a list of folks who like bluegrass music or horses or who send out more than 20 emails a day or anything else they can mine from the simple little data they got from you, plus what they added from other sources when their computer programs found matches.

Then those folks who bought my name on those lists will start to do the same thing – selling lists of names, and before you know it, everyone will be owning my name on a list. Talk about viral! We don't need to have the Internet to make something explode beyond it's boundaries.

Now that puts me not just on the list for the free E-Card company but I'm also on the list for everything anyone wants to market and everything I never asked for.

Responsible sharing is what is called for here. You wouldn't share publicly that your best friend is out of town for a month, and “oh, by the way they left the front door unlocked, so help yourself,” would you? You wouldn't share publicly that your friend's bank account has an extra hundred thousand dollars in it and “oh, by the way, here's the account number.” You wouldn't, would you? Even if I promised to give you something for free? Come on … I'll let you have a free Prescription Bluegrass guitar pick.

Responsible sharing means thinking before you jump into something. And, perhaps, the thing to do is to never give out (or enter into any free offer) another person's email address unless you have specific permission to do so. It's their personal property and they've trusted you to keep it safe, not to sell it wholesale for the price of a token.

Now about that free Prescription Bluegrass Guitar pick, where shall I send it?