I don't know if CS could have solved this - it's not as if the spam was a mistake/glitch. "Proper" customer service would not have made the spamming any more palatable.
"I'm very sorry about that. We'll give you a full refund, and our next version will fix this."
Would he have written the same blog entry now? It's slightly fashionable to call out good customer service -- perhaps the entry would be about how they screwed up and completely redeemed themselves.
"I'm very sorry we conspired to use your private data to spam your friends. Here's a full refund, and now that our pants have been caught around our ankles, we will stop doing this."
Has a different ring to it. Good customer service will absolve accidental Bad Things(tm), not malicious acts.
That was my first thought - but to me it sounded more like they were contacts already downloaded to his iPhone, or the contacts file you can download from GMail for your own personal backup. I don't think he gave them his password - unless I'm mistaken?
edit: in any case, your advice is still right on the money, and I'd have to second it!
Sounds like iDrive spammed every contact on his iPhone, and because of the fact/coincidence that he has gmail set to save every person you ever send an email to as a contact, AND because of the way he is using gmail on his iPhone, this became "iDrive spammed my gmail address book".
If a company is selling a service (iDrive) which is basically "store your contact data on our services, trust us with this data", it's pretty shitty for that company to then turn around and market to the contacts in that data. It's probably in their TOS or something, but it still feels like an abuse of trust.
I wrote that a while ago here and got flamed for it in a pretty heavy way. I really object against any third party applications or websites that ask you for your credentials, it is asking for abuse.
The more people get conditioned to supply their credentials to parties other than the original service the more we'll see this kind of problem.
I got a few of these emails from IDrive yesterday (one pimping IDrive, and the other pimping IDrive lite), and I was wondering what the hell was going on. At least now I know they've earned their place in my spam folder.
Apple gets bashed for being too selective in approving apps.
Instances like this will raise the ante on the approval/rejection process. Pretty tough to vet the ethics of the company behind the app as a part of it, eh?
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[ 217 ms ] story [ 475 ms ] threadWould he have written the same blog entry now? It's slightly fashionable to call out good customer service -- perhaps the entry would be about how they screwed up and completely redeemed themselves.
Has a different ring to it. Good customer service will absolve accidental Bad Things(tm), not malicious acts.
edit: in any case, your advice is still right on the money, and I'd have to second it!
If a company is selling a service (iDrive) which is basically "store your contact data on our services, trust us with this data", it's pretty shitty for that company to then turn around and market to the contacts in that data. It's probably in their TOS or something, but it still feels like an abuse of trust.
The more people get conditioned to supply their credentials to parties other than the original service the more we'll see this kind of problem.
I wonder how many non-techies (the masses) have had their Outlooks ripped vs how many been ripped off by web 2.0 site participation?
Instances like this will raise the ante on the approval/rejection process. Pretty tough to vet the ethics of the company behind the app as a part of it, eh?