TRUSTe
announced a partnership yesterday with Mailshell.com to
monitor the e-mail practices of its privacy seal program
members.
"We're providing the technology that will allow TRUSTe to
conduct an e-mail monitoring and seeding program," said Eytan
Urbas, vice president of marketing at Mailshell.com, Santa
Clara, CA. "What we do is enable TRUSTe to anonymously sign up
for each licensee's list using a unique e-mail identity. Then
TRUSTe can monitor the activities for each
list and make sure they
are compliant with the mailer's privacy policy."
TRUSTe is a nonprofit online privacy organization that
grants its seal of approval to Web sites with comprehensive,
accessible and readable privacy agreements. Companies deemed
worthy of the program must sign a contract with TRUSTe that
ensures adherence to the approved privacy policy.
Mailshell.com is an e-mail management service that weeds
out unsolicited messages from business-to-business lists and
commercial opt-in e-mail.
According to Urbas, the two privacy firms previously had
been looking to collaborate, and this partnership seemed to be
a natural fit.
Using Mailshell's proprietary technology, TRUSTe can tell
which of its members, if any, are violating their privacy
policies and, therefore, their agreements with TRUSTe.
The technology also can identify members that sell or rent
their e-mail lists, according to Urbas.
If a mailer is found by TRUSTe to be in violation of its
privacy policy, Mailshell provides irrefutable proof of the
violation through its unique e-mail IDs, he added.
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