Privacy Risk
Before entering data one should be aware of the privacy risk: "You grant Opobox a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free right to (a) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat Your Information in any media now known or not currently known..."
The data collection policies of Names Database allow the data to be used for spamming. There is also some concern about the posting of the personal information of children, though the site forbids such actions.
When entering other peoples information such as their email address, you then become personally liable for the use of that information and you have most likely not asked permission to use said information in such a way. To avoid problems, always have written permission from those people whose email addresses you are submitting. It may be a paid service, but on the site there is no information to confirm payment and the service provider supplies no site contact that may remedy any disputed payment.
Apart from privacy risks, confidence tricksters are now also using the Names Database in an attempt to achieve their obscure goals. Any new e-mail address can actually afford a fraudster any identity on the database. By registering e-mail addresses at any of the free e-mail facilities such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc., they create duplicate identities or identities that closely resemble actual people on the database. Unsuspecting users trying to reconnect with old friends or schoolmates can thereby actually contact a fraudster, thinking they are sending a message to a known person. The confidence trickster then tries to solicit further private information, and is known to use 419 Nigerian Letter or Advance-fee fraud methods to further entrap their victims.
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Famous quotes containing the words privacy and/or risk:
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)