I’ve a good friend in Australia. Ok, that’s probably not relevant at all, but I think you ought to know that I have at least one friend!

He sent his 79 year old mother a card via 123greetings.com a site which used to be a reputable site and which used to let you send free eGreetings cards. But the site has been raped and pillaged, and I assume this has to be with the site owner’s consent, or they would have stopped it. It now appears briefly, and then morphs into a site that probably shoves spyware at your machine.

His mother was told by the thing that she’d visited adult sites. It scared her. He wrote to them. They replied:

“We understand your concern.

We being a free greeting cards site are dependent on our sponsors to keep bringing these beautiful cards to you folks.

It is the advertisers who decides the form of advertisements which in this case are in form of pop-ups. Meanwhile, as you find these pop-up’s irritating may we suggest you to use any software of your choice to block the pop-ups to make your card sending experience more enjoyable. May we suggest you to download the google toolbar for your system for effectively blocking such pop-ups.

We hope that this solution works for you and look forward to having you on our site more often.”

He’s not amused. They “marketed” to his mother without his or her consent, and marketed in such a manner as to scare her. And, since they also have her email address, what else is likely to happen?

If it’s their fault, and it looks like it, then they deserve all that gets thrown at them. If it;s a glitch from a particular advertiser then the advert needs to get pulled. Heck, you can’t even read the card! And if they don’t pull it, then it’s their fault.

What they are doing is losing trust. Short term they may make money, but the trust is gone. There’s no way I’ll trust them with my email address now, nor my friends’ email addresses.