Online petition signer be warned

4

To the Editor:

I signed an online petition offered in the “Comment” section of the Oct. 11th article about Stephen Nichols’ recent horrendous treatment. The petition website is change.org. As of today, supposedly 2,178 folks have signed the petition. The problem is that since I signed (email address given) this worthy petition, I have received hundreds of junk emails, spam, and shady robocalls (I didn’t even give my phone number). I’ve had to spend way too much time unsubscribing from a wide range of spam ads. I wonder if by unsubscribing to these spam ads, I am actually creating more spam. In any case, unless the online spam petition system changes, that was the last online petition that I will ever sign. While signing this online petition, maybe I did something wrong, like check a box or not uncheck a box. Has anyone else experienced this problem after signing this petition?

Peter Pfluger
Vineyard Haven

 

4 COMMENTS

  1. Spammers are dishonest . Clicking on the ‘remove’ link usually informs the spammer that now they have a ‘real’ email address of a recipient, which will receive more spam from another one of their sleazy entities. The ‘unsubscribe’ from a legit sender may or may not work. They will claim ‘you are receiving this because you signed up with one of our partners’….which is untrue. But if they were legit in the first place you would have not received anything you did not request.

  2. I didn’t sign this petition but have had the same problem with change.org in the past. Multiple times. I no longer sign anything on that site because of it.

  3. That is a real bummer. I also signed this petition and many others on change.org as well as another petition site and have had no such issues… I wonder why?

  4. Notnewhere, aquinah, and mytwocents, Thank you for your feedback. With well over 2,000 folks that supposedly signed that petition, I thought that many more would have responded. Mytwocents, maybe since you created the petition (good move by the way) you were exempt from having your email address exploited. I’m usually very careful when giving personal information online, but maybe I checked one box too many that turned out to be Pandora’s. The petition option is such a good platform for the people. I just wish there was one that didn’t need to make money by selling our email addresses.

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