After a six-month investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, Datran Media was required to pay $1.1 million in penalties, disgorgements, and costs. The New York City-based company is a marketing firm whose clients include AOL, Cingular, and Nielsen, among many others. Datran mines customer data and demographics for its clients. The investigation found that Datran improperly obtained the personal information of more than 6 million U.S. consumers. Spitzer called this case the largest breach of privacy in Internet history.
Datran was accused of acquiring e-mail addresses and other personal information from Gratis Internet, who has a published privacy policy pledging not to sell their customers’ information to anyone “for any reason.”
Datran says that it stopped using the information given to them by Gratis during the first half of 2005 and updated its privacy policy near that time, which now reads: “We may sell the personal information that you supply to us, and we may work with other businesses to bring select opportunities to our users… Additionally, Datran Media purchases and manages e-mail lists generated by affiliate web sites and organizations.”
Mark Naples, Datran’s spokesman, said that his company was left with the dirty information after Gratis had changed its policy and complied with the Attorney General’s investigation.
The Attorney General’s Office is now set to proceed with its investigation of Gratis.
Source:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70420-0.html?tw=rss.index
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