Comment Re:Dell doesn't harvest addresses (Score 2, Insightful) 242
Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies who either do the harvesting, ...
Actually, nobody involved here did any "harvesting" of any addresses. "Harvesting" implies that they did something to earn their list of addresses, something akin to sowing and nurturing a field of crops. They did nothing of the sort.
A better term for such behavior would be something like "scraped" or "dredged", something more appropriately descriptive of the indiscriminate collecting of addresses on a large scale. It's a change in usage that I would like to see happen. "Harvested" seems to have become something of a de facto standard term for the practice, unfortunately.
There is a place for "harvested" in describing a list of addresses. This would be an appropriate term for a list of addresses built up by (confirmed) opt-in, i.e. everyone on the list knowingly consented to be on that list, for whatever the purpose of that list is.
However, unlike agricultural harvests, a harvested list cannot be sold or given away. The moment it is transferred to someone other than the harvester, it's junk, it's garbage; it's beyond useless, in fact, as it would be counter-productive if ever used.
Actually, nobody involved here did any "harvesting" of any addresses. "Harvesting" implies that they did something to earn their list of addresses, something akin to sowing and nurturing a field of crops. They did nothing of the sort.
A better term for such behavior would be something like "scraped" or "dredged", something more appropriately descriptive of the indiscriminate collecting of addresses on a large scale. It's a change in usage that I would like to see happen. "Harvested" seems to have become something of a de facto standard term for the practice, unfortunately.
There is a place for "harvested" in describing a list of addresses. This would be an appropriate term for a list of addresses built up by (confirmed) opt-in, i.e. everyone on the list knowingly consented to be on that list, for whatever the purpose of that list is.
However, unlike agricultural harvests, a harvested list cannot be sold or given away. The moment it is transferred to someone other than the harvester, it's junk, it's garbage; it's beyond useless, in fact, as it would be counter-productive if ever used.
