Originally Posted by
BengeBoy
I believe that the data privacy laws between the UK and the US are quite different. )
The selling on of addresses may be one difference- but We have an "Electoral Roll" that lists name age and address of every person that can vote in the UK. Any company can use this to post anything they want to you. But Mailing out cost's money. Using the internet doesn't. The electoral role may not specify my buying habits- but it will tell them that I live in a certain "Class" area and that I own my own home.
If I just make an enquiry to a compny by Internet- If I give my E-Mail address- I start getting all sorts of un-associated Mail from all sorts of companies. I get round this by Typing part of the address in CAPITal letters and then it gets rejected by the spamming senders computers as a bad address. Or I enter the address as doug@ instead of stapfam@. There must be someone with doug@ that gets a lot of funny mail.