jason’s blog

Over the past few months I’ve been receiving these yellow cards in my mail requesting to “CALL TODAY” to update my information in some kind of Queen’s directory. Naturally suspicious, I ignored the notices until something caught my eye: a little copyright saying (c) Harris Connect, Inc. on the side of the note.

This led me to believe that Queen’s has sold my contact info to a third party company, and the information is now being used not by the university, but by a private company for commercial purposes. When I called the number (1-888-869-0786) I found out the truth.

The company has already received basic contact info from the university (name/address/phone/grad year was confirmed on the phone) and also probably the profile that I’ve filled out on the alumni website which includes my company and occupation. Moreover, that information is going to be cross-referenced with “public sources” of information to be produced for a alumni directory that is available in hardcover for $90 or by CD-ROM.

While they assured me that the information is only sold to alumni and the alumni association, I’m suspicious of my personal information leaving the university, published to external media, and available to such a large group of people in an uncontrolled manner. Moreover, Harris Connect is an American company – should the information leave Canada we would have very legal rights to it’s control.

My old friends from Queen’s are on email, Facebook, etc. I don’t think any of my friends are going to pay $90 for a directory just to find me. Moreover I do not wish to be spammed by some “enterprising” alumni that has use for this information that is conveniently available in CD-ROM form. I called them and requested that my information not be published in this publication – I think you should too.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 10:56 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.